Harbhajan lets loose

SOMEWHERE in the bustling industrial city of Jalandhar, Harbhajan Singh is probably lying in bed staring like a zombie at the ceiling.

That's because word is out that Cricket Australia is on his tail . . . and they are not happy.
CA chief executive James Sutherland has taken exception to Harbhajan calling Matthew Hayden a liar and Adam Gilchrist "no saint" and yesterday fired off an angry email to the Indian cricket board. "Enough is enough," Sutherland wrote. "Despite assurances that you have instructed him not to fuel this issue any more, Harbhajan continues to say whatever he wants. When will it ever end? Could you please deal with your player in regard to these comments."

Cop that Harbhajan. Just when you thought you were home free, how's that for a pineapple up your jacksey. You thought Underbelly was rugged viewing . . . it's Play School compared to what is going to happen to you. We'll say it once and once only . . . no one messes with CA.

One press box cynic yesterday tipped that, as a result of the email, a shamed Harbhajan would flee India to Afghanistan and take residence in a hillside cave beside Osama bin Laden. He may never be seen again.

Then, of course, there's the more likely option that he will get a printout of the story, make a paper plane out of it and spear it from the balcony of his first floor apartment to the street below. He may even have a giggle about it in the way winning boxers do when they hear the losers complaining about the referee and demanding a rematch.

Harbhajan and India are as cocky as you like at the moment.

The email to India probably sums up the summer for Cricket Australia. When the big administrative guns needed to fire they were a step or 20 behind where they should have been. The time to go ballistic about the clearly out-of-control Harbhajan was two months ago when he acted up in the Sydney Test.

There's no point whingeing now. I never thought I would see a summer where Cricket Australia administrators were outmanoeuvred on home soil but it happened this season.

The end of the summer has come at a good time because everyone dislikes everyone at the moment. Australia's players have lost respect for CA because they caved in over the charges against Harbhajan in the monkeygate affair. CA has lost time for some of its players because they feel they cannot control them with the increasingly controversial Andrew Symonds the prime example. CA's brittle relationship with Indian cricket chiefs was also tested in the extreme over the blow-ups in the playing ranks.

Even the media corps have fallen out with many Indian journalists feeling their Australian counterparts are shameslessly biased towards their own team.

It is doubtful whether CA's relationship with its players will ever be as strong as it was because it has allowed a rival body (the Indian Premier League) to "get" to its men.

Once you do that your control over them is never as strong again.

Symonds could walk out on Australian cricket tomorrow and be guaranteed $1.5 million a year for the next three years from India. For the moment Australia needs him slightly more than he needs them.

For an employer to agree to someone else paying your players more than you do is a very dangerous move though, in CA's defence, there was little they could do about it.

Another worry for Australia is that with the Twenty20 Leagues becoming so big, attitude sells. Bad is good, so to speak.

When Cricket Australia does its 25-man contract list the only criteria for its rankings are what a player has done over the past year and is likely to do in the future. Marketability doesn't come in to it. But in Twenty20 it is almost as important – sometimes more important – than ability.

Symonds had a shocker of a one-day series but his marketability to the Twenty20 boys is greater than ever because of his clash with the streaker and his outspoken public comments which forced his newspaper column to be scrapped.

Harbhajan's price is going up by the minute and he is loving it all for he can be shameless when he has to.

A few years ago he agreed to take his turban off to be photographed for a whisky commercial. About the only thing he has knocked back was a 2001 offer to become an honourary police superintendent in his home city.

Even for the man himself the thought of Harbhajan being a policeman was too much to bear.

tac wrote:Eric Blair once said that serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, and the disregard of all rules. Thus India's use of it's financial power and it's constant reliance on threats and the race card to influence officials can perhaps be seen as the apotheosis of sport.

JB wrote:Why don't you go run out into traffic 119 times but only run back and dodge the cars 118 times?

JB wrote:I think you'll find that I was posting on this thread before you, lympet boy. Not that I'd know what you wrote, since I'm not paying any attention to you.

doremi wrote:Funny how those comments were picked up by the Aussie press only, you'd think the rest of the world wouldn't ignore juicy soundbites like the one Harbhajan provided.