darragh murray

The media beat-up on Ricky Ponting, the Australian cricket captain, and the rest of the Australian cricket team is excessive to say the least. Many sections of the press are clamouring to demand the head of Ricky Ponting, and at the same time describing the way in which Australia play the game as ‘arrogant’.

I believe that the blame for certain incidents that have come out of the second test in Sydney have been unfairly placed in front the Australian captain’s door. The fact remains that it was the umpire’s who were at fault for the bad decisions in the test – not the Australian team. It was the ICC representative that opted to ban Harbhajan Singh for three matches for racial abuse despite an apparent lack of evidence, not the Australian team. I agree that perhaps Singh should not have been banned due to the apparent lack of credible evidence – however, as I’ve just iterated, any perceived fault in the ICC handling of racial complaints belongs solely to the ICC. There have been questions over whether this incident could have been handled on the field, and I’m inclined to this argument, it could very well have been. The fact that it was not maybe displays a temporary lack of good judgment by Ricky Ponting, but certainly not one for which to execute him through the Australian sports media.

Many commentators have noted that the term ‘monkey’ is not considered insulting in India. I’m afraid this line of attack doesn’t hold any water for me. If the allegations of describing Australian cricketer Andrew Symonds as a ‘monkey’ by Harbhajan Singh during the match was meant in the context of non-racial, presumably complimentary, nature, are they not admitting that Singh actually referred to Symonds in such a fashion? If not, why go to the bother of defining the term’s cultural meaning for Indians? Does that mean that the spectator’s at the infamous match in India last year who greeted Symond’s with monkey chants during the Australian’s tour of India in late 2007 were actually being somehow complimentary to the Australian cricketer? Why is Symonds targeted with such descriptions, and not the rest of the Australian team? These questions have not been adequately answered, and thus I feel that the claim that the term ‘monkey’ is a light-hearted non-racial descriptor is not convincing. The fact remains that the Indian team is in Australia, where the term is not acceptable, and thus cannot be explained away as simple ignorance. The heart of the issue should be the alleged lack of evidence in finding Singh guilty of using such a slur, not the cultural meaning of the term in an Indian sense.

In regards to the questions that have popped up in regards to Ponting’s ability to captain the Australian team, the idea that he be dismissed as captain of the team is absolute nonsense. Do you think any other cricketing nation who had a team as successful as the current Australian team would, in their right mind, sack the captain for being too successful? Captain’s are being sack left right and centre over the past few years in teams such as England and India for being precisely the opposite – not being successful. Ritchie Bernaud, a former Australian captain and cricket commentator, appeared on the Today program this morning and reaffirmed his support for Ponting’s leadership, and I wholly agree with these sentiments. The Australian’s play great cricket within the rules of the game, and they play it hard. If they played anything less, the media would be still calling for Ponting’s head. It seems the Australian captain is caught between a rock and a hard place.

This is by far a more opinionated piece than I’m used to presenting on my blog, and if anyone reads it, I’d expect some polemic replies.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 8:14 am and is filed under Opinion, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.