Sport - Cricket

Setting a bad precedent

‘Spirit of cricket’ seems to be all-talk and no-action, especially when one is at the receiving end. The appeal by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) against the one-Test ban imposed by ICC match referee Chris Broad against Gautam Gambhir is setting a bad precedent.

Indians have been quite notorious in flouting the Code of Conduct and in the case of Gambhir it was evident that whatever may have been the provocation, elbowing the opposition can’t be tolerated. Despite obvious evidence the BCCI appealed to the ICC after Appeals Commissioner Justice Albie Sachs upheld the decision of the match referee of banning Gambhir for one Test. One needs to study the repercussions of such incidents if they are backed by the parent body.

Ideally, like the Chairman of the England Selection Committee Ray Illingworth fined captain Mike Atherton for applying dust to the ball much before the ICC match referee acted, the BCCI ought to have penalised Gambhir who is perpetually seeking confrontation.

Javed Miandad once admitted that if there was no confrontation on the field when he was batting, he found it hard to concentrate. The Australians have said that about Gambhir; that he needs some sort of provocation to concentrate on his batting. If one observes minutely, Gambhir does have the tendency to get into confrontation with the opposition early in his innings.

The problem is that he is not shrewd enough to do it diplomatically so that the match referee can’t bring up any of the clauses of the Code of Conduct.

In the context of Indian cricket, Gambhir could set a bad example for the youngsters if he is allowed to go scot-free. There have been some serious instances which have been reported by the match referees in Indian junior cricket. Abusing the opponent is being encouraged by the coaches and funnily the umpires put it down as part of the game.

This we are told is also part of the strategy management. First, abuse the batsman and if he survives, put pressure on the umpires. In the Irani Trophy which was played at Rajkot, Munaf Patel used unparliamentary language against Sehwag and Akash Chopra and the match referee reported the matter to the BCCI. Instead of dropping him from the Indian team, he was selected and still continues to be in the team.

In the larger interest of the game the BCCI must not set bad precedents. In Harbhajan Singh’s case, the BCCI did have some ground to back the player but surely not in the case of Gambhir. By supporting Gambhir, the BCCI is sending the wrong signals to other players.

And finally, the selectors continue to be casual. While picking the technically sound Murali Vijay for the Nagpur Test was a very good decision, dropping Robin Uthappa who was the Man of the Tournament of the Challenger Series from the ODI team indicates performances are not the sole criteria for a player to get picked. They continue to roll the dice.

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