Cricinfo - Blogs - Rob's Lobs - Monkeyline revisited

Father: Well, no. Sledging was just the current buzzword to describe attempts by teams to unsettle the opposition with verbal taunts that were, well, about as subtle as a sledgehammer. And back then players weren’t miked up as they are now, so they weren’t as careful with their words.

Son: I wish they weren’t. It’s so quiet out there. They even limit you to three appeals per batsman in our games at school. And when was the last time anyone got suspended for misbehaviour? They’re like saints. There’s no passion, no fun…no reality.

Father (wearily but forcefully): Don’t let’s get started on that one again! Anyway, India’s offie, Harbhajan Singh, who’d been getting Ponting out time and time again and REALLY getting up a few noses, was batting them into a first-innings lead when Brett Lee…

Son: The DJ?!

Father: Is that what he does now? Anyway, Lee says something to Singh, who proceeds to pat him on the bum with his bat. Andrew Symonds sees this…

Son: You mean Symmo the AFL coach?

Father: The very same. So Symonds has a few choice words with Singh, telling him how ordinary he thought patting a bloke on the bum was, whereupon Singh, he later claims, calls him a monkey. Charges are brought by Ponting and Singh is suspended for three matches.

Son: Why? Was Symmo hairy? Did he have bad table manners?

Father: Well, he did have these dreadlocks, but no, it wasn’t about hair. In the old days, before the Aboriginal Truth and Reconciliation Commission changed things here, just a few years before you were born, black people were often likened to monkeys.

Son: But my teacher told us a couple of weeks ago that monkeys are considered holy in India. Anyway, why would an Indian be racist towards a black man? Didn’t they refuse to play South Africa during apartheid?

Father: Very confusing, I know. These days crowds almost always mock players for their fashion sense but back then, when it wasn’t possible to have cheap pigmentation transplants, racism often reared its head when sporting passions were aroused, especially in cricket. And that was a time, remember, when the former Pommy colonies were beginning to assert themselves, and before China, Ireland, France and Germany became Test nations.

Son (eyes glazing over): Ah, I see.

Father: Then the papers here started saying Singh actually called Symmo “maa ki” – a mother…well, something that couldn’t possibly be confused with a compliment. The other issue, claimed Symmo, was that he’d been called a monkey in India a few months earlier, both by crowds, which was reported, and by Singh himself, which wasn’t. On that first occasion, he claimed, he had felt that, rather than report Singh, the two should settle the issue between themselves. What happened next remains shrouded in mystery, though rumour had it that Singh sent Symmo a signed copy of the St James’s Bible and the matter was dropped.

'Was Symmo hairy?' © Getty Images

Son: What I don’t understand is how it could have caused such trouble. Which I presume it did because you don’t tag “line” on to a word just like that, do you? I mean, there was Bodyline of course, but all those other big incidents only had a “gate” at the end, didn’t they?

Father: Well, the Indians threatened to go home if the decision wasn’t reversed and there was a spell of a few days, halfway through the series…

Son: Series?

Father: Oh, back then teams would play each other up to five times in succession, with the overall result helping to determine the world championship. Remember, this was before they legalised the teleporter: flying players in and out for one match made no sense when it took up to 24 hours to get here rather than 24 nanoseconds.

Son: Gawd. Imagine how knackered they must have been. No wonder Lara’s 400 wasn’t beaten until last year.

Father: Anyway, it looked as if the Indians would go through with their threat, although the appeal, for political reasons, was delayed, allowing Singh to play in the next Test. The Indians seemed to feel they had a pretty good case. After all, it was Symmo’s word against Singh’s, and Tendulkar swore he never heard Singh say “monkey”, which was pretty shrewd of him when you come to think of it. What was he going to do? Rat on a teammate? Some even argued that Symmo had wilfully misheard, and/or misquoted Singh, in order to get his captain’s tormentor into trouble and hence impair his effectiveness as a bowler.

Son: Who did you believe?

Father: To be honest, even now, I’m not sure, if only because it was so hard to trust people back then, before we all had to have this confounded honesty chip inserted in our brains. But the additional problem was that the match was atrociously umpired. In fact, Symmo benefited hugely, and even admitted as much, and this game is now seen by some historians as the trigger for the referral system we have now. But that didn’t help the Indians, who lost with less than 10 minutes of the Test left, and were so unhappy they demanded action. The International Cricket Council, which was the largely powerless body they had before the International Cricket Board, stepped in and agreed to replace one of the umpires for the next Test, who also happened to be black. The chief executive, who later ran a major internet dating agency from a caravan in Darwin but whose name I always forget, denied that the ICC were bowing to pressure, but nobody believed him, not for a second.

Son: Why would a powerful governing body be scared of one country?

Father: Well, as I say, the ICC was pretty impotent back then. And besides, even before the abolition of religion in ’21 and the reunification with Pakistan in ’23, India had more than a billion inhabitants, most of whom were cricket fans, not soccer crazy as the Indistanis are today, so they generated most of the TV revenue. And when the Indian board saw film of people in Kolkata and Mumbai burning effigies of umpires being sent round the world, that, fuelled by the sense of shame at having their national team accused of racism, convinced them they had no option but to take a stand. Pulling out of the tour would have cost the Australians a lot of money in refunds and so on.

Son: OK, but so what? Hadn’t this sort of thing happened before?

Father: Well, to a very small extent perhaps, but there’s more to it. While all this was going on, the Indian tour manager claimed that Brad Hogg - who you only know as the bloke on those posters welcoming Chinese immigrants - had called both India’s captain and vice-captain something rude, using the same word. Theoretically, this carried the same three-match punishment, which seemed perverse. This in turn prompted all manner of debate all over the world as to whether a racist comment was really on the same level as personal abuse, which you and I both know is not the case at all. At the height of it all, some Pommie journo living here wrote a column calling for Ponting’s resignation, for the way his team’s behaviour had shamed the country and undermined the spirit of the game, which in turn led to a two-year investigation of the journo for espionage.

Son: Well, the Poms did win the Ashes back in ’09, didn’t they?!

Father: Blimey. You’re not as ignorant as you make out, are you? Anyway, it was all shaping up for an almighty explosion, with enormous potential repercussions for cricket, Australian national security and world peace, when, in the space of 24 hours two days before the next match, two important things happened. First, the Indian board announced that the tour would proceed regardless of the outcome of Singh’s appeal. Then, equally suddenly, the Indian team withdrew all claims against Hogg. Which was another clever move, putting pressure on the Australians to drop the charges against Singh.

Son (stifling a yawn): So, did they?

Father: Yes, although I wonder whether they’d have done so if their new prime minister, a forceful man eager to change our international image, hadn’t made a major speech before the Perth Test began. He stressed that cricket, since it was the national sport, should always present Australians at their best and that winning should always run second to upholding the principles of fair play. The trouble, he added, was that racism was far more widespread than Australians would readily admit to, and then announced that he would be taking steps to rectify matters for the Aboriginals. How many Australians, he wondered, actually saw Symmo as the first player of African lineage to represent Australia in a cricket match? By ignoring his colour, were they not exposing their embarrassment? That was the way the PM saw it. And that speech in turn is said to have persuaded the author Salman Rushdie to write a blog, accusing Indians of institutionalised racism, for which he spent the next 10 years receiving death threats, but the arguments that ensued led to an important change in the Indian constitution and, ultimately, the reunification with Pakistan and...

Son (patience wearing thin): Yeah, yeah, yeah – thanks, dad. I’ve only got 20 words, remember.

Father: OK. How about...”the 2008 Indo-Australian storm in a teacup that changed cricket, ended racism and made the planet a better place”?

Son (laughing softly): Dear dad - such a softy. How about “Disgraceful international incident involving two cricketers that steered the game down the road to politeness, silence and utter boredom”? Yeah, that’ll do me.