Overreacting to Molehills

It's been 3 days since the India-Australia Test at Sydney got over, but the furore over the events during the match simply refuses to subside. I suppose you could call this a good thing, what with Test cricket getting such passionate attention after a prolonged spell of unpopularity, but that would be being optimistic in the extreme. You know what else has been extreme? The knee-jerk and unreasonable reactions to the whole unfortunate episode. I'm sorry, but threatening to boycott a cricket tour because of a couple of bad umpiring decisions and a harsh sentence for an allegedly racist remark is going WAY overboard. I wonder if the series would have been in as much jeopardy as it is now if India had managed to save the Test?

The media has been every bit as excessive in its assessment of the affair as the boycott-happy Indian cricket board. The Times of India has been particularly boisterous in its coverage of the episode, first calling for the result of the Test to be annulled and then proceeding to devote headline after headline (and editorials too) to the threatened tour. Perhaps someone should tell the guys up at The Times of India that if the result of every Test match that suffered from umpiring errors was annulled, there would barely be more than a couple of Test results in the sub-continent in the 80's and early 90's. Umpiring errors, specially when they come from non-biased umpires (Steve Bucknor and Mark Benson are both 'neutral' umpires; they have almost no connection with Australia or Australian cricket) have to be taken with a pinch of salt; there's nothing much you can do about them until the ICC and the cricketing world in general realize the importance of bringing technology into all decisions on the cricket field. So much for level-headed common sense.

As far as the 'bad sportsmanship' of the Australian cricketers is concerned, I'd like to know when the Aussies have ever been a saintly group of sweet-talkers. The Kangaroos have been known to be past masters at sledging, or 'mental disintegration' as Steve Waugh liked to euphemistically put it, and if the rest of the cricketing world could tolerate their nonsense for a whole decade, then why the hue and cry all of a sudden? The English and their 'jellybeans' tactics hadn't attracted half as fierce a backlash as the Aussies have in this Test, which makes me really wonder whether it's just human nature to revel in the foibles of the mighty and the powerful. And puh-lease, since when has claiming half volley catches become a criminal offense? Nearly every player in the world has done it at some point of his career, and while that doesn't make it any less distasteful, it certainly does raise a few questions about the indignant reactions to Michael Clarke's catch to dismiss Sourav Ganguly (which, incidentally, wasn't even proven to be conclusively illegal).

The Harbhajan Singh-Andrew Symonds spat was a serious issue, I'll admit, but wouldn't a straightforward motion for an appeal (which is all the Indian management was left to do eventually anyway) have sufficed, rather than the dramatic boycott threats and disturbingly grave statements that the BCCI so foolishly indulged in? Ah, theatrics! How we love to honour thee! Ok, maybe that was a little cheesy, but I really am at pains to understand why the media and the Indian cricket board have made such a big issue out of this matter. It was only a cricket match, after all - a cricket match in which a few decisions unfortunately and unwittingly decided the course of the match, but also a cricket match in which one team lost because it couldn't survive an over of part-time left-arm spin. Perhaps it would do the Indian team a whole lot of good if its management spent half as much time and effort as it did in attacking the umpiring and refereeing in the match into teaching its bowlers how to hold a bat.