Skip to main content

Cricket

I hope that the tour is called off, India goes home and they send a team of grownups next time. Honestly, it seems like a bunch of 12 year olds are making their decisions/excuses.

India's decision to "suspend" the tour while it waits for an appeal on the Harbhajan Singh suspension is perhaps the crudest of blackmail I've seen in world sport for a while, and the ICC should let them spit their dummy and walk away rather than give in to such bully-boy tactics.

If the ICC caves in and changes the Harbhajan verdict in the face of Indian threats, the game will cease to have any credibility. For the BCCI to claim that it "abhors racism of any form", but at the same time does not view the "monkey" jibe as racist is quite clearly ridiculous and deserves nothing but contempt. Peter Roebuck is a bloke I normally have plenty of time for, but his article that condemned Ponting, Hayden, Clarke and Gilchrist but sought to justify Harbajan’s “exuberance” was a poor a piece as I have ever read, and appeared to sail very close to setting up different rules for different countries.

In many respects, India’s reaction (sulking and whinging) is a shame, they had got a dud hand on many of the calls, and Symonds should never have publically said that he was out. I got the feeling that most people were sympathetic, but any thinking person can have no sympathy for their carry on over the past day and a bit. It will only drive the nations further apart.
Labels:

Comments

Bloggy said…
I think you are mistaken my dear friend. This incident is not actually an aftermath of what happened in Sydney but it rather is a protest from the long neglected sub-continent teams towards the "Cricketorial Colonization".
The so called whites have always been doing this to the third world countries. But nobody before this has treated them for tit for tat. Now when through their sheer efforts Indians are slowly but steadily shifting the center of gravity towards this part of the world be it Economy, Technology, IPR. This is becoming their eye-soar. This is not that cricket is hitting australia but the Indian Rupee gaining more demand than Australian Dollar!!!!
8 January 2008 at 10:14
Kris McCracken said…
Yeah, nothing says "we are a proud mature nation ready to assume our proper place in the world" quite like the hissy fit and attendant illogical justifications for racial abuse that we've seen from the Indian hierarchy in this example.

I’m all for greater global equality, and agree that India is (and should) assume its place as a rising superpower, but the appropriate response to perceived arrogance and domination should perhaps be something other than ill-mannered conceit and intimidation. Sadly it seems to be a global phenomenon, where boorish dictators like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro are feted as heroes, while they actually act in a far more imperialistic manner than those they rebuke for "bullying imperialism".
8 January 2008 at 11:20
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral
5 comments
Read more

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke
38 comments
Read more

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.
36 comments
Read more