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Sometimes we all need a slap in the face to wake us up. But Harbhajan Singh’s strike on Sreesanth seems to have stung Indian cricket. After watching, open-mouthed, at how events have unfolded over the past few days, I believe that Harbhajan and Sreesanth have cheated both their fans and their country.
Off-spinner Harbhajan, with the most controversial track record in the contemporary history of the game, was backed up by one billion Indians when allegations of racism were made against him during India’s tour of Australia at the turn of the year.
For weeks, the country woke up in the early hours of the morning to find out if ‘their’ cricketer had been found guilty by the authorities. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) exploited every legal loophole through political and diplomatic machinations against Cricket Australia and the International Cricket Council (ICC). They even kept a plane of stand-by — the tour of Australia hung in the balance if Harbhajan was found guilty.
As things stood, he lived to fight another day and the tour ended in a blaze of glory for him. It seemed that a higher power had delivered a classic justice in Harbhajan’s favour. But the decline of his moral fibre had already begun.
Even though there is no co-relation between the episodes against Symonds and Sreesanth, it is now difficult to fathom that Harbhajan is more often than not just a ‘misunderstood’ young man. He believed he had gained unlimited immunity: That every action of his would be justified, not just in his own eyes, but by the BCCI.
Then came the stinging slap, and with that he cheated us into believing that he was just a simple, but aggressive, cricketer who is deified by his fans but misunderstood by the West due to a cultural glitch. This is no longer true, for Harbhajan is his own worst enemy.
The 11-match ban in the Indian Premier League (IPL) has ensured that Harbhajan has lost not just a lot of money but credibility among his India colleagues in the dressing room. As for Sreesanth, he always needed a bit of a spanking. The little boy with modest talents who squared up against the biggest and the best of them — including the orchestration of an impromptu and childish bhangra, complete with bat waving over his head — has now been rendered fit to be in a crèche, playing with children of his own age.
He has, quite frankly, been an embarrassment on more than one occasion. Images of him, sobbing disconsolately on the pitch, will bear witness that he too needed a tap on the head to get himself out of the clouds.
For better or for worse, it turned out to be a tight slap in the face.
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