Date:17/10/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/10/17/stories/2007101756662300.htm

Sport - Cricket

Broad reports ‘racist comments’

Melbourne: Match Referee Chris Broad, overseeing the India-Australia one-day cricket series, has written to the International Cricket Council (ICC) that there were racial comments from the crowd during the fifth match at Vadodara last week.

The former England opener has filed a report to the ICC mentioning that there were racial taunts during the game which Australia won by nine wickets. However, it is unclear whether Broad filed another critical report in this regard about the match at Nagpur, where all-rounder Andrew Symonds was allegedly the victim of monkey chants, Fox Sports said.

An ICC spokesman confirmed that Broad had alerted the ICC of his concerns. The spokesman said that the match referee has a standard anti-racism pro-forma to fill in at the end of every Test and one-day international. “It just so happens that he filled it in slightly differently from the norm,” the spokesman said. — PTI