Andrew Symonds stands his ground after nicking an Ishant Sharma delivery in the infamous Sydney Test © AFP

"There was the one time that I didn't walk," he said, grinning. "We were playing West Zone in the Duleep Trophy and the captain told us not to because the chaps on the other side didn't. So I stood my ground, but that was the only time." Who was the captain? I forgot to ask him. It must have been his Hyderabad skipper, ML Jaisimha.

During the show, a young man in the audience asked if it wasn't natural to retaliate if you were provoked as Harbhajan had been by Symonds. Wasn't it important to speak up, to teach your tormentors a lesson? "A lesson?" asked Pataudi. "Wasn't Harbhajan fined fifty percent of his match fees? You teach someone a lesson when the other man loses his match fees." The studio audience laughed and clapped. He thought Kumble was the only one who had emerged from the controversy with any grace. "He led India to a win in the Perth Test. That was the best possible answer to Sydney, to win on the field of play." Loud applause. Pataudi has a relaxed, ironical manner that makes cricketing chauvinism seem vaguely absurd.

I went up to Syed Kirmani to shake his hand. He was the best Indian wicketkeeper ever and the last one to keep his mouth shut behind the stumps. After him Nayan Mongia inaugurated the age of the cheerleader keeper. Now it's mandatory for a ‘keeper to chirp and yap and appeal non-stop, allegedly to keep his team's spirits up. "After I had played more than eighty Tests, my captain (who shall remain un-named) asked me to appeal more aggressively and frequently. He suggested I imitated another, younger keeper," Kirmani said.

Kirmani refused to name names even off the show, but the the fact that this happened to him late in his career, gives us a clue. I suspect the keeper he was urged to emulate was the young Sadanand Visvanath who was part of the one-day team that won the World Championship of Cricket in Australia in 1985. The way Kirmani told it, he asked his captain with awful calm if he (the captain) had ever felt a lack of support behind the stumps in the dozens of Tests they had played together. If he hadn't, why was he urging him to make dishonest appeals in the autumn of his career? Resounding applause followed this rhetorical flourish.

He told another story of the time he toured Australia. Bob Simpson was the Australian captain. Kirmani thought the umpires in Australia were one-eyed. He'd appeal for an catch, be turned out and Simpson (who was batting) would turn and swear at him. After this happened a few times, Kirmani made his move. He made sure, in between overs, that the umpire was in earshot and confronted Simpson. He began by saying that Simpson was a great man and that he, Kirmani, was a novice nobody so the swearing made no difference to him. On the other hand, being sworn at by a nobody ought to make a difference to someone of Simpson's standing. So Kirmani translated all the desi abuse he knew into English and gave Simpson a earful. The story didn't end there. In a dinner party after the match, Kirmani was talking to Sir Donald Bradman and his wife (or begum as Kirmani put it) when Bob Simpson came up to him and apologized. It's a lovely story and, oddly enough, Simpson comes out of it well: I can think of many senior Indian cricketers who wouldn't have had the grace to acknowledge that they were out of line.

I asked Kirmani and Pataudi when not walking became the rule in Indian cricket. Pataudi was categorical that every batsman in the teams he captained, walked. Both of them thought that the shift came in the Seventies. That seemed about right, anecdotally. I remember Gundappa Vishwanath (debut 1969 with Pataudi as captain) always walked, but Sunil Gavaskar (debut 1971 with Ajit Wadekar as captain) didn't.

There's been a lot of talk about the ethics of not walking, especially after the Sydney Test. Harsha Bhogle raised an interesting question. How could Ponting campaign for the fielder's word to be taken on trust in the matter of a catch, when the same player in his capacity as a batsman was willing to stand his ground knowing he had nicked the ball and been caught. Surely, as Harsha suggested, the player ought to assist the umpire in both cases if he was to remain credible. Ian Chappell (and subsequently, some Australian cricket writers) made the reasonable point that a batsman was merely exercising the accused person's time-honoured legal right not to incriminate himself. The fielder, on the other hand, had the greater responsibility, because claiming a dodgy catch was like perjuring yourself, something that could be severely punished. So it was reasonable to take the fielder's word on trust because the fielder knew that if he was found to have betrayed that trust, sanctions would follow.

But the batsman's right to remain silent is based on the presumption of innocence and that presumption is hard to sustain the presence of cameras. Every time you nick the ball and don't walk, the camera is likely to show you taking advantage of human fallibility. The procedures of law are created in large part to enshrine the benefit of doubt because judges and lawyers know that in a court of law you can't have God as a witness. But today, on a cricket pitch, you can and you do. The television camera's omniscience is beginning to create a crisis for the hard men who refuse to walk.

Behaviour once seen as merely tough or hard-bitten becomes harder to justify when the camera picks up the nick: witness the revulsion that followed Symonds' frank acknowledgement that he had been caught but not given out early in his innings in Sydney. The leeway traditionally granted to certain kinds of cricketing deception is threatened by the camera's unblinking gaze. To his great credit, Adam Gilchrist instinctively understood that batsmen couldn't brazen it out any more and led by example. It's about time that his peers, Australians, Indians and the rest, followed suit. For Pataudi and Kirmani, walking was a point of honour; for cricketers in the age of the camera, it ought to be an act of self-preservation.

	Tennis allows three challenges; given umpires of the quality of Benson and Bucknor, half a dozen might be too few © AFP

India lost the Sydney Test because the umpiring was one-sidedly awful. It was good to see Kumble and his team-mates shake hands with the Australians but formal salutation is where congratulations should stop. This was a Test match where the excitement was manufactured by incompetent umpires making weird decisions: the Indians players must have felt like lab rats being chivvied by mad scientists.

While previewing the present series in this blog, I wrote that for the Indians to have a chance the umpires would have to hold their nerve. Well, they didn’t. Test series in Australia have in recent years have followed a pattern: the touring team struggles to to hold its own against the superior home team; then, at vital moments when the beleaguered tourists have a chance of saving the game or winning it, they get a shocker. Or two. Or three. In the Sydney Test the Indians lost count.

I’m not even thinking about lbw decisions which are judgement calls: we’re talking about audible edges being given not out [Ricky Ponting, Andrew Symonds, Michael Hussey], a stumping against Symonds not being given by the third umpire despite video evidence to the contrary, a stumping where Symonds’ heel was raised not referred to the third umpire by Steve Bucknor, a non-existent edge given against Rahul Dravid when his bat wasn’t in the same latitude as the ball and perhaps, most infuriatingly, Sourav Ganguly given out, caught by Michael Clarke because the fielder said so. Benson didn’t ask the square-leg umpire for confirmation, he asked the Australians. The Indians could be forgiven for thinking that a player who had bizarrely stood his ground after being caught off a massive edge, and who had just dropped a sitter off the same batsman, mightn’t qualify as a neutral witness.

To those who would say that Ponting refused to claim a catch in similar circumstances in the first innings, the point is that whether an umpire decides in principle to refer to the third umpire or not, he needs to make his decisions on the basis of his own judgement or by conferring with his fellow umpire, not on the testimony of an interested party, the fielder. Circumstances alter cases: the same Ponting in India’s tense second innings tried to claim a catch that he hadn’t completed [the ball in his hand hit the ground as he completed his dive].

Why do touring teams get such shockers from neutral umpires? I don’t know. Perhaps umpires prefer their appealing technique, perhaps the Australians, as the dominant team, get the benefit of any doubt, but the point at which opposing teams and their supporters begin to despair is when they get a decision like the one Kumar Sangakkara got from Rudi Koertzen, given out caught off a ball that wasn’t near his bat at a point in the match where Sangakkara was leading an unlikely Sri Lankan resurgence.

The Australians have become so used to dodgy decisions going their way that it reflects in their onfield manner. Most batsmen stand their ground when they think they’ve got a faint edge that the umpire mightn’t have noticed; they generally leave when their edges echo round the stadium. When Clarke was caught in slip by Dravid off Anil Kumble the reason he stood his ground despite the deviation and the sound was because he had learnt both from long experience and Symonds’ good fortune in the first innings, that there was a decent chance he would be reprieved. The horror on Kumble and Dravid’s face when they saw he was sanding his ground was comical: their second appeal which Bucknor finally upheld was a masterpiece of disbelieving desperation.

If Benson was incompetent, Bucknor was incompetent and perverse. The moment that summed up this match’s inexplicably bad umpiring was Bucknor’s decision not to refer Dhoni’s appeal for a stumping against Symonds to the third umpire. What was he thinking? Bucknor and the Indians have have a long history of friction and this last performance by him is unlikely to improve things. He is scheduled to stand in the Perth Test: I’d be very surprised if the Indians don’t formally petition the authorities to substitute him. If I was Bucknor, I’d withdraw and use the time to see an opthalmologist: his dismissal of Dravid in the second innings suggests that he’s seeing things.

Looking to the future and how the game can deal with human error, I think Peter Roebuck has the right ideas. The ICC should take a page out of tennis’ book and allow each team a fixed number of challenges so that they can appeal decisions that they think are plainly wrong. Tennis allows three challenges; given umpires of the quality of Benson and Bucknor, half a dozen might be too few. But seriously, if competitive Test matches aren’t to be ruined and if, in particular, Australian tours are to remain credible, cricket’s authorities need to act now.

	Ponting, Harbhajan, Tendulkar and Gilchrist in conversation after Harbhajan's confrontation with Symonds © Getty Images

The Symonds affair and the charge of racial abuse laid against Harbhajan Singh by Ricky Ponting could change the way in which international cricket is monitored and regulated. I say ‘could’ because the affair could also pan out straightforwardly with punishment for Harbhajan and no general consequences for the game.

If there is any corroborative evidence (besides the testimony of Symonds, Matthew Hayden and Ponting) that Harbhajan used racist taunts when he responded to Symonds’ comments by confronting him on the field, Harbhajan should not only be banned for the period laid down by the ICC’s rules, the BCCI should put the spinner on notice: it should warn Harbhajan that any subsequent offence will result in his banishment from international cricket. The board equivocated in the matter of racist abuse from spectators in Vadodara and Mumbai; it mustn’t make that mistake again. Mike Proctor hasn’t revealed the specific comment(s) for which Harbhajan is charged, but the rumour in Australian newspapers is that Harbhjan called Symonds a monkey. Chetan Chauhan, the Indian team manager, has been reported saying that Harbhajan denies having said this; he is also reported as saying in the same breath that ‘monkey’ in Indian usage isn’t a derogatory word. If the report is accurate, this is exactly the kind of shiftiness that the touring team’s management should avoid. If Harbhajan called Symonds a monkey he should go down; preferably forever.

Newspaper reports seem to suggest that the umpires didn’t hear the exchange that gave rise to the charge. Channel 9 has reviewed its audio tapes and found no record of the offensive comments either. They do, however, have recordings of the subsequent chat which involved Hayden, Ponting, Sachin Tendulkar and Harbhajan. So it is possible that these tapes have Harbhajan referring to his comments, perhaps even apologizing for them. In the pictures that I saw while watching the telecast, I saw Harbhajan making what seemed to be conciliatory hand gestures. If he was apologizing and his apology contains the offending word and if that word is ‘monkey’ or something similarly racist, that should be evidence enough.

The other possibility is that in the course of the hearing, Tendulkar, who was batting with Harbhajan at the time and who seemed to have heard part of the exchange, isn’t able to whole-heartedly exonerate Harbhajan. It’s unlikely that he’d explicitly ‘shop’ a team-mate but Tendulkar’s an honourable man and if he heard Harbhajan flinging racist abuse about, he might be reluctant to perjure himself. This is an unlikely outcome: in his public statements about the spat, Tendulkar has said that he heard nothing objectionable said, but it’s just possible that in the grave context of a quasi-judicial hearing, his account of the incident might subtly change in ways unfavourable to Harbhajan.

However, if neither tape nor Tendulkar backs up the Australian charge, then international cricket’s in trouble. Hayden has been quoted as saying that the Australian’s have a very strong case. If the case is based on the kind of connections that are being reported in Australian press, the evidence is underwhelming. The Sun-Herald has reported that the Australian case will be based on the argument that Harbhajan is a ‘repeat offender’. The Australians will, apparently, allege that Harbhajan used the monkey taunt against Symonds in the seventh ODI in Mumbai in October. Michael Slater, who commented on that match, has backed up that claim. The trouble with this argument is that the Australian team didn’t lodge a complaint against Harbhajan at the time and I haven’t heard or read Slater going on record about Harbhajan’s Wankhede behaviour before the current crisis.

Given that Harbhajan and the Australians had tangled in the course of the series and Harbhajan had alleged after the 2nd ODI that the Australians had abused Indian players with ‘personal and vulgar’ words, the ‘repeat offender’ argument, without other corroborative evidence, will seem like a way of settling scores, rather than punishing bigotry. Harbhajan could equally argue that Symonds’ comments were part of a pattern of offensive Australian behaviour. This is what he said after the second ODI in India:

	The Australians will, apparently, allege that Harbhajan used the monkey taunt against Symonds in the seventh ODI in Mumbai in October © Getty Images

“After the match Harbhajan was not laughing and said the Australians had shown themselves to be bad losers after their defeat to India in the semi-finals of the Twenty20 World Cup. "They clearly did not like that," Harbhajan said in the Sydney Morning Herald. "They are a very good cricket side, but that does not mean that they can do whatever they want to do. They say they play the game in the right spirit, but they don't in reality. There is nothing gentlemanly about the way they play."

After being dismissed by Michael Clarke in the 84-run loss, Harbhajan waited mid-pitch and pointed his bat. "I was responding to a lot of vulgar words that were said to me," he said. "I don't have any problem with chitchat on the field, so long as it is about the game. But when it is very personal and vulgar, that is not on. They think you cannot fight back and they do not like it when you do.”

Cricket has been down this road once before. Some years ago Rashid Latif was accused by Adam Gilchrist of calling him a ‘white c__t”. Latif denied the charge and was exonerated; it was his word against Gilchrist’s and there was no way of proving the charge. If the Harbhajan-Symonds dispute ends the same way, the consequences could be larger. If it turns out that Ponting made an accusation of racism which the Australians couldn’t back up, the accused Indians will be left with a lively sense of grievance and injury. There’ll be no shortage of people arguing that the Australians tried to opportunistically fit Harbhajan up in the middle of a closely contested Test match, or, more seriously, that Ponting recklessly used cricket’s adjudicatory process to intimidate and unsettle an opponent.

Australian cricketers famously leave on-field quarrels on the field. Ponting has chosen to take Harbhajan to ‘court’. Slater supports the decision because racism is unacceptable and he’s right. Racism is unacceptable. But if Ponting can’t come up with the evidence for a ‘conviction’, if his case is based on Symonds’ word and Harbhajan’s ‘prior form’, I can see players and officials asking for stump microphones to be left on all the time so that allegations of this sort in the future can be settled by technology. I can also see players retaining libel lawyers and disputes like this one being resolved in real law courts.

If Mike Proctor finds against Harbhajan, Indians might simmer awhile, but the Australians will have been vindicated. If he clears him, there’s a real chance that on-field chat will be systematically monitored in the future, and Ponting’s recourse to the match referee might well be remembered as the day Big Brother came to stay.

	Making monkeys of themselves: the spectators who were ejected from the Wankhede © Getty Images

In Baroda and Bombay, Andrew Symonds, the only non-white, Afro-Caribbean member of the Australian side, was heckled by spectators who called him a monkey, and made ape-like motions in case he hadn't got their point. The Sydney Morning Herald published a photograph of two middle-class, middle-aged Indian men making like monkeys. Symonds, his captain, his team mates, and Australian newspapers thought this was as patent a form of racism as you were likely to witness on a cricket field and said so. The ICC wrote to the BCCI expressing concern.

Sharad Pawar said he hadn't received the ICC's letter. He borrowed the theme of cultural difference that Ricky Ponting had used earlier in the series in another context - that of sledging - to make his point. In the days that followed, this became something of an Indian theme: the Australians had misunderstood the crowd's gestures. There was no racism intended. The police commissioner in Baroda even supplied an alternative explanation: the monkey chants were no more than the spectators invoking the simian god, Hanuman.

The non-official reaction was similar. The newspapers were slow off the
mark. Some suggested that Indian crowds had always jeered combative
cricketers like Symonds; the monkey business was volatility, not racism.
Indian crowds had been known to call West Indians "kaliyas" or "hubshi" and English cricketers "goras" because they were, respectively, black and white.
The implication was that Symonds with his dreadlocks and face paint, more or
less invited the heckling by turning out in a contemporary version of
blackface. Looked at reasonably, it was possible, the argument ran, to see
it as no more than a kind of empirical teasing where unsophisticated
spectators named what they saw: gora, kaliya, bandar.

Some opinion pieces struggled with the large question: are Indians racist?
And if they are, are they racist in the same way as white people who are racist?
Critics referred to the Indian obsession with being light-skinned, a
preference happily specified in classified matrimonial ads and further borne
out by the sale of fairness creams. One writer described this preference as a form of "soft racism", an attitude similar to notions of white superiority in western societies, but different in two ways: a) there was no republican history of state sanction for racist prejudice, unlike in white settler colonies like Australia and South Africa in the past b) the variation in skin colour within networks of caste and kinship in India made "hard" bigotry, genetic racism, difficult. Others made the point that caste discrimination,
specially the practice of "untouchability" was as vicious a form of discrimination as apartheid or segregation.

As the days passed, a pattern emerged in the public response to the taunting
of Symonds. The reaction after Baroda was defensive. After the Bombay match,
where Symonds was booed at the prize-giving, and where the monkey
taunts were repeated, the Indian response changed: the police evicted the
worst offenders and charged them in court, Pawar denounced racist behaviour
as unacceptable, and newspapers carried editorial mea culpas. It was Hamish
Blair's brilliant photograph of two middle-class Indian men in the Wankhede
stands, trying to look like apes and succeeding, that swung Indian public
opinion away from denial towards an acknowledgment that there was a problem
that needed to be named.

And its name is racism. It's silly and deluded to look for anthropological
explanations that will turn racist behaviour by Indians into something
subtly different. Cricket writing by Indians in English sometimes makes the
mistake of thinking of the "average" Indian fan as non-English speaking and
therefore naïve and unsophisticated. This assumption makes it possible for
"us" to explain "their" behaviour away as a kind of unschooled brutishness
that is unfortunate but not wicked. This is why Blair's photograph is so
important: it shows you upwardly mobile men - who probably discuss the
virtues of one malt whisky over the other, who possibly holiday abroad, whose
children certainly go to private schools that teach in English - using one
of the many international codes they've learnt in their cosmopolitan lives,
the Esperanto of bigotry. The mudras they're making aren't derived from
Kathakali : they're straight out of the international style guide to insulting black men.

It's hard for Indian fans to cede moral advantage to an Australian team.
They are so much better at the cricket that outrage is often the only
consolation we have. It's hard to fault the Australians' behaviour on the Symonds
affair: they've made their point, done the BCCI the favour of not lodging an
official complaint, been appreciative of the board's belated denunciation of
racism, and have signalled their willingness to move on. The Indians, after a
slow start, have redeemed themselves by booking the bad guys. To keep up the
good work, we need to do the same again. And it doesn't have to be a racial
insult the next time round: it could be, given our versatility in the matter
of prejudice, a religious slur.

To say this isn't to concede some civilisational defect but merely to point
out that we can't enjoy the glow of self-righteousness without the rigours
of self-examination. Our virtue as a nation is that we committed ourselves
to an inclusive pluralism. Our aim as a cricket-playing nation ought to be
to live up to that ideal.

	Under the spotlight © AFP

Bishan Bedi has been sent a letter by Muttiah Muralitharan’s lawyers for comments he made recently about the off-spinner's bowling action and newspapers report that these lawyers are threatening to ‘drag him to the courts’ if his response is unsatisfactory. Bedi, as everyone knows, has form when it comes to denouncing Murali’s action. There used to be a whole chorus of ex-players who were happy to call Muralitharan’s action illegal. Now, as far as I can tell from the papers, there are just two. I remember reading Martin Crowe a few months ago, arguing that Muralitharan’s action ought to be formally examined at regular intervals and the second, of course, is Bedi.

Muralitharan’s other critics (Michael Holding, Ian Botham etc.) have fallen silent. This could be because they’ve been persuaded by the ICC’s argument that modern cameras have proven beyond reasonable doubt that nearly all international bowlers ‘flex’ (i.e. bend and straighten) their arms while bowling. Consequently (I’m speculating here) they’ve come to accept that a bowler who keeps his flexion inside the 15 degree limit deemed legal by the ICC, isn’t a chucker.

So what keeps Crowe and Bedi going? I don’t know Crowe at all, but I do know Bedi a little and it was at an event in Delhi organized around my book, Men in White, that he said the things that set off the controversy. The event was meant to be a chat about cricket with Bishan Bedi as the main attraction. I was on the panel because I’d written the book and Gaurav Kalra, the sports editor at CNN-IBN, was moderating the discussion.

I asked Bedi why there hadn’t been a decent book written by an Indian cricketer in the last fifty years (apart for Sunil Gavaskar’s Sunny Days) despite the fact that lots of our Test cricketers were university boys. Erapalli Prasanna, his ‘spin twin’ in the late Sixties and Seventies had produced One More Over, a dreadful ghost-written thing, turned out in a week. Bedi didn’t really have an answer; ask him a question and instead of an answer, you generally get a really funny story and, at some point, an opinion.

So there was a story about Prasanna and his anxiety about being selected when Wadekar took over from Pataudi and a little later a story about Madan Lal playing Jeff Thomson from well beyond the leg-stump in Perth which stopped the discussion for a couple of minutes as the largely middle-aged audience screamed with laughter. Typically, Bedi followed up the story with the observation that we needed to remember that Madan Lal was playing the fastest bowler ever without a helmet and that there were one or two batsmen in the current Indian team who owed their reputations to the insurance they wore on their heads.

Then Gaurav asked him a question about Muralitharan and Bedi weighed in with his views which were familiar since he’s aired them so often. But because they were aired here in the context of a discussion (and in response to questions from the audience) they offered offered clues to his position on Muralitharan in particular and chucking in general.

Bedi seems to believe that the congenital crookedness of Murali’s arm is used as an alibi to shield him from the charge of chucking. Murali’s defenders make two points. One, if Murali’s arm seems crooked in the early part of his action, it isn’t a preliminary to straightening it: it’s just the way his arm is. Two, when an arm with a bent elbow is rotated, it creates an impression of a kink in the motion, which is an optical illusion.

The reason Bedi won’t accept this as a reasonable explanation is because he believes that the only practical way of supervising legitimate bowling actions is with the naked eye, i.e. what the umpires see in the middle. He refuses to accept that decades of cricketing common sense can be overset by laboratory science or sophisticated cameras.

There was a pointed question from the audience. Had Bedi seen the film of Murali bowling in a brace, where he bowled the off-spinner and the doosra (and turned them) with a rigid, inflexible arm? Bedi again offered his basic position: how do we know that Murali, when bowling a doosra competitively without a brace does not flex it? And who is to call him if he does? If it is the umpires, we have to trust their judgment.

On this point, I think, Bedi is being dogmatic. He (and others) have often asked the rhetorical question, how can any one turn the wrist for the doosra the way Murali does, without bending and straightening the his arm. Well, by bowling in a brace, Murali is trying to answer that question. He’s showing us that it is anatomically possible (for him, at least) to do it. And since so many of us have asked that question, we are bound to attend to his demonstration.

	'There was a pointed question from the audience. Had Bedi seen the film of Murali bowling in a brace, where he bowled the off-spinner and the doosra (and turned them) with a rigid, inflexible arm?'© Getty Images

This still does not rule out the possibility that in the heat of battle Murali may consciously or unaware, flex his arm to really rip the doosra. Bedi has made a serious point about the supervision of the game in general, not just the matter of policing Murali which the ICC needs to take seriously. Murali isn’t responsible for his imitators, but the ICC’s rulings change cricket from the highest level to the lowest, and I’ve seen children in neighbourhood parks manage very creditable imitations of Murali’s bowling style, happily bending and straightening their arms because they know its allowed on television. When Bedi says the ICC has created a monster, he doesn’t mean that Murali has horns: he’s being metaphorical.

But Bedi doesn’t seem to realize that what really annoys Murali’s fans and supporters is the implication that the ICC introduced the 15 degree rule to fit Murali in. The truth is that to start with the ICC introduced differential limits of flexion (5 degrees for spinners, 7.5 degrees for medium pacers, 10 degrees for fast bowlers) and when the unfairness and impracticality of this was pointed out, abandoned this plan. The fifteen degree rule happened after a study of the actions of international bowlers revealed that nearly every bowler bent and straightened his arm, including fast-bowling paragons like Glenn McGrath. Critics of Murali like Holding did an about-face when shown the evidence and by and large, the cricket world followed suit.

I asked Bedi what he thought of the finding that nearly everyone chucked, including bowlers who had never come close to being called like McGrath and Gillespie. Bedi dismissed the point. McGrath’s bowling action, he asserted, was pure (his word) and the only way you could judge the legality of a bowler’s delivery was relying on the human eye. McGrath looked legal, so he was legal.

Oddly enough, this is very close to the position the ICC took when it introduced the fifteen degree law. The ICC’s justification for flexion up to fifteen degrees is the argument that till that point (15 degrees), the human eye can’t see the bending and straightening that occurs. It’s only the modern camera that can catch that kink in a bowler’s action. The ICC is looking for historical continuity: it is implying that the 15 degree rule isn’t sanctioning a new era of chuckers: it is merely formalising a ‘flexion’ that always existed in international cricket but which couldn’t be discerned or measured because we didn’t have modern cameras and the apparatus of sports science.

	Tony Lock © The Cricketer International

Not unnaturally, Bedi isn’t keen to buy this argument. Bedi, by near-universal agreement, had one of the loveliest slow bowling actions in the history of the game and he refuses to accept that he and his spinning contemporary were actually chuckers but didn’t know it. He didn’t turn the ball much and a bit of ‘flexion’ might have helped him turn it more, but that didn’t fall within his understanding of the dharma of a bowler (as it was then defined) and he thinks that the ICC’s present permissiveness has slighted cricket’s entire history and the first principles of his craft.

It doesn’t help that the ICC’s rationalisation of the 15 degree rule doesn’t seem to work in real life. I think I can see the kink in Brett Lee’s action, and Harbhajan’s and Shoaib Akhtar’s. So do many other people. Either they’re bending and straightening their arms more than the allowed fifteen degrees and getting away with it or flexion below that fifteen degree ceiling is also visible, which makes a nonsense of the ICC’s rationale for that number. If it’s the latter, then it means that bowlers are getting away with more today than they were getting away with in the past.

Instead of going after Murali as the symbol of modern cricketing decadence, Bedi should be asking the ICC to publish the results of the survey of bowling actions that it undertook, complete with names and degrees of flexion. If it’s technically possible, the sports science boffins should look at older films, say Bedi’s bowling action, and tell us what degree of flexion they found. Once we have numbers on which bowler flexed his arm and by how much, we’ll be in a position to judge whether ICC should bend the rules (as it has done) to fit bowling ‘reality’ or whether bowlers will have to adapt their actions to fit a enforceable ideal. If, for example, a bowler like Jimmy Anderson is found to have flexed his arm appreciably less than, say, Brett Lee, then the ICC needs to lower its level of tolerance to Anderson’s level and force Lee to make changes in his action to conform. Similarly, if to bowl his doosra (or his pehla for that matter) Murali has to flex his arm more than, say, Ramesh Powar, the rules of the game should force him to alter his action. It’s worth remembering that this is exactly what Tony Lock had to do. An attacking left arm spinner, he changed his action in the mid-Fifties after he was called for bowling his faster ball and was never quite the same bowler again.

On the other hand, if the ICC conducts a systematic study of bowling actions past and present and publishes its results, and if these results validate Lee’s action and Muralitharan’s (to name two bowlers, one fast and one slow, whose bowling actions have caused comment) by showing that bowling actions were always thus and it is only modern cameras that highlight kinks which had hitherto blushed unseen, then the ICC could specify a historically consistent level of flexion and dissenters like Bedi and Crowe would have to fall in line or run the risk of being seen as cricket’s cranks, not its conscience-keepers.

Till this happens, we’ll continue to be treated to the depressing spectacle of a magical bowler being singled out and hounded for a system-wide problem. And now, thanks to Muralitharan’s lawyers, we are faced with the squalid prospect of the greatest slow left arm bowler of our times, being sued for speaking his mind (even if we allow that he tends to call a spade a shovel). Muralitharan’s claim to being considered the greatest bowler of all time won’t be settled by a defamation suit. His place in cricket’s history, and cricket’s historical integrity, needs the intervention of the ICC.

Editor's note: Given that this subject arouses strong passions, we will only publish comments that add value to the debate. Comments that are even mildly abusive, racist or defamatory will be deleted

	'The problem with Chappell wasn't his candour, it was his propensity to intrigue' © Getty Images

One of the recurrent themes in the gabfest about Chappell's departure is the inability of Indians to deal with straight talk. In this view the robust candour that comes naturally to Australians is something that thin-skinned, hero-worshipping, neurotically sensitive desis find hard to deal with. Sanjay Manjrekar had a version of this view in an audio interview on cricinfo.com . Having hired a foreign coach, he said, the Indians should have braced themselves for the frankness that was likely to come their way, even if it was alien to their nature, but they didn't. Chappell held up the mirror to Indian cricket and Indian cricket wasn't brave enough to look at the ugly truth. Also, says Manjrekar, the storm over Chappell is beside the point because cricket coaches don't make much difference to the team's fortunes. It's the players who are responsible for victory and defeat.

That's good to know.

Actually India did have a foreign coach who dealt quite well with his team for nearly five years. John Wright's tenure didn't make the Indian team a squad of world-beaters but it did rather better than this team has done under Chappell. But Wright was a creature of the team's senior players, argue some, while Chappell refused to accept that individual cricketers could be bigger than the team. Chalk up another one for the straight-talking Aussie, the coach as lion-tamer.

This is orientalist nonsense.

It can be plausibly argued that the problem with Chappell wasn't his candour, it was his propensity to intrigue. Several cricket journalists I've read or spoken to (and this includes Chappell's protagonists) testify to his habit of sending sms messages to journalists leaking his views on players, selection and policy. The players who disliked him complain about how manipulative he was. They might be wrong and self-interested but it's odd that Indian journalists and commentators should find the stereotype of the straight-talking Australian and the truth-denying Indian easier to credit than the chorus of allegations that Chappell's preferred mode for communicating with the media was the modern equivalent of harem whispers.

Just as odd is the 'balanced' view that equates criticism of Chappell and his methods with a willful blindness to the structural problems of Indian cricket. I find no difficulty in holding in my head (at the same time) two related but distinct ideas: 1) that the BCCI presides over a mess and 2) that Chappell is a terrible coach. The need for structural reform and the necessity of making the best of what you currently have aren't contradictory goals. A good coach will have a vision of the future, but his primary job is in the here and now. Chappell had poor results in the here and now when he coached the national side in arguably the worst organized cricket system in the world (India) and he had indifferent results when he coached a provincial side in the best organized cricket system in the world (Australia). It seems to me that Chappell is the constant here.

Clint Eastwood was a great star who returned to the movies to direct others in hugely successful films. Greg Chappell as coach is Clint Eastwood in age…only without the hits. Speaking for myself, I'm delighted he's gone.

	Forgiven but not quite forgotten - Deano returns to the commentary box © Getty Images

When I switched on the television in the morning yesterday to catch up with the third ODI between India and Sri Lanka, who should I see in the Neo Sports studio but Dean Jones. What’s he doing, I wondered, on a South Asian channel after the things he had said last year?

And what had he said? I wrote a piece on the controversy at the time which can be found on the Hindustan Times website here. But since Jones has turned up on our TV screens again and since I don’t think that bygones should be allowed to be bygones in this instance, here’s an extract from that article that summarizes its main argument.

“He said, “the terrorist has got another wicket,” when Amla, a bearded South African Muslim of Indian descent, took a catch. Jones thought he was making a private comment to his fellow commentators but the microphone was live and it carried his words to a television public.”

Peter Roebuck and Alan Border leapt to Jones’s defence. Their line was that Jones didn’t mean it, couldn’t have meant it because everyone knew that Jones wasn’t a bigot or a racist.

“”This was the same defence that Darren Lehmann mounted when he called the Sri Lankans “black c___s”. It was also the defence used by Jewish friends of Mel Gibson (another man who has spent some growing-up time in Australia) after his anti-Semitic outburst. Mel, they said, ‘wasn’t like that’.

Wasn’t like what? What does a man’s track record have to be before a bigoted comment made by him qualifies as bigotry? It’s unlikely that a television commentator will have prior form or known links with the National Front or the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or a pro-apartheid party. But why should we need more than the evidence of our ears?

Let’s try to set this in a ‘Western’ perspective because Jones’s defenders seem to be having trouble appreciating the vileness of what Jones said in the context of cricket in Sri Lanka. Here’s a hypothetical circumstance. Tiger Woods is playing golf at the US Open. He sinks a putt, there’s a pause and the commentator, thinking he’s in a commercial break, says to his colleague, with the microphones on, “The nigger’s holed another one.” How long do you think that commentator would last on prime time? How many golf correspondents and commentators would characterise his comment as a ‘bit stupid’? And how many people would buy the line that “some of my best friends are…”?

	Jones tried to suggest later that he wasn't referring to Hashim Amla at all © Cricinfo Ltd

The truth is that no American commentator working for a major TV channel would use ‘kike’ or ‘nigger’ or ‘faggot’ with their colleagues around even if they thought the mikes were switched off. Because political correctness, in the best sense of that term, has made these words unsayable. To use these words in polite society is to court ostracism.

Dean Jones said what he did because he thought his colleagues in the box would be amused, because he didn’t think the words he used were taboo. Jones assumed that a remark tossed off like that would pass without challenge or reproach. That’s the real significance of this incident, not the fact that he got caught with the microphones on.

“The terrorist has got another wicket”: this is the casual bigotry of the locker room which assumes that the guys will go along. It’s bigotry founded on an assumption of shared prejudice because you can bet Dean Jones’s last Australian dollar that he wouldn’t have said what he did with Rameez Raja and Imran Khan in the room.

That’s why the eagerly forgiving attitude of his peers is disappointing. They’ve responded like members of a guild, not as professional men looking out for cricket or broadcasting.
…
The reason ‘kike’, ‘faggot’ and ‘nigger’ are taboo today is because public opinion backed up by social sanction made them unsayable. If an Indian commentator was caught calling … a Dalit player a ‘chamar’ he would never work again. Roebuck and Border and cricket’s commentariat seem to think calling a bearded Muslim a ‘terrorist’ doesn’t belong in the same category of proscribed words. Well, it’s up to us to persuade them that it does, through a policy of zero tolerance.

It has been unsubtly suggested in the press that Jones was sacked from Ten Sports because his employers were Muslim. I hope that isn’t true. I’d like to think that ESPN, Star Sports and Zee Sports, regardless of the religious beliefs of their owners would have done the same thing. India is a secular, pluralist nation and sports channels that work out of this country need to make sure that the people they employ respect those ideals.”

Neo Sports must believe that Jones has seen the error of his ways and is therefore fit for public consumption again. Except that he hasn’t and therefore isn’t. After self-serving apologies of the some-of-my-best-friends-are-Muslims sort, Jones tried to suggest that he wasn’t referring to Amla at all.

As Andrew Miller pointed out in Cricinfo earlier this year, ‘Jones was sacked by Ten Sports almost before the utterance had passed his lips, but within the month he was back, denying he'd ever erred. “Amla got the catch, Nicky Boje was the bowler," he wibbled. "I'll leave it up to you to work out who I was referring to." Nice one. Except it had been Pollock bowling at the time.’

A man in denial can’t be contrite. Ergo, Dean Jones shouldn’t be commentating on Indian television.