Reactions after Hansen's verdict on Harbhajan case [Merged]

[bharat297]

In this whole fiasco I don't understand why the hell Symonds was not fined for abuse. A more balanced judgment would have been both Bhajji and Symonds getting fined. The Aussie media and team who are trumpeting the lack of Bhajji's record should consider themselves very fortunate.

Very true ... Symonds should have been fined too. The fact was there was NO evidence to suggest he actually uttered the word monkey (according to Sachin, Bhajji said "teri maki", which IMO is much worse) so if he were found guilty, despite no evidence, it would be the biggest screwing over in cricket history.

[Sachinism]

Bring It On!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Sachinism]

like everyone has been saying, aussies had it coming to them they can give but cant take it

[kooljatt]

just watch this video guys and see how ****ing ponting bossing over bensen...aussies r :finger: losers ..can't win it by playing proper cricket [ame=http://youtube.com/watch?v=wdOJDQbDAsk]YouTube - Harbhajan Symonds Conversation from Stump Microphone[/ame]

[Mandrake]

Ponting ran out of diapers it seems

[fineleg]

:hysterical: @Ponting

[fineleg]

Punter iz a loser when it comez to sportsmanship. Pup will continue the spirit after him. (Punter is a terrific batsman, one of the best, but thatz besidez the point)

[arkay]

Robert Craddock: Funny article (Hard truths) New award needed for farce Robert Craddock January 31, 2008 11:00pm IT'S time Cricket Australia scrapped the Allan Border Medal night and introduced a new concept . . . The Harbys. Let's turn a negative into a positive and replace the awards no one watches with those you wouldn't miss. Let's honour the spinner who managed to turn the cricket world upside down in a manner he could never do to a cricket ball. Accuse me, if you will, of turning the game into a farce. But it is a farce, isn't it? Haven't you been reading the papers? So, after much thought, we highlight the awards which recognise the contribution of those in cricket's darkest comedy. Congratulations to . . . Best foreign language actor: Harbhajan Singh for cleverly changing his story between the first hearing, when he denied saying "monkey", and the appeal, when he suddenly confessed to saying "teri maki", which sounds like a chicken sauce to Australians, but to Indians means "motherf*****". Harbhajan is a gifted acting chameleon capable of playing all types of roles from heart-broken victim to caustic sledger. His volatility is a worry for the game. Best comedy: The laughably highbrow Spirit of Cricket pact signed by Australia's leading players, particularly the clause in which they promise to respect other cultures. Yeah well . . . it sounded like a good idea at the time. Captain Ricky Ponting is a huge supporter of the pact but further down the line other players would like to see it tossed to the garbage bin. The outside world can just tolerate Australia playing a bully-boy game – that's what we are – but when we pretend to be choirboys it's just too much. Services to the industry: Indian captain Anil Kumble, the only man in the entire drama to emerge with his dignity intact, even if his sledge at Australia for not playing within the spirit of cricket was a tad self-righteous. Best adapted screenplay: Cricket Australia and the national team for roaring like Bengal tigers in protest against Symonds being called a monkey but squeaking like church mice when confronted with the threat of a $60 million contract with Indian television being broken. Australian cricket is not as strong as it thought it was. Most versatile actor: Indian cricket board vice-president Lalit Modi, who changed direction so many times he could hide behind a corkscrew. Modi threatened to cancel the tour if Harbhajan was not cleared, withdrew the threat, made it again, then spread rumours a private plane had been hired to take the players home, even though it never was. Best producer: ICC match referee Mike Procter. After years of being criticised for being too soft, he jumped in boots and all and suspended Harbhajan, forgetting the one thing you need is cold, hard evidence. Procter is one of the game's nice guys but not suited to being a referee. The ICC has always believed you have to be a Test player to be a referee. The time has come to look outside the system for people trained in law enforcement who also know something about the game. Best actor: Andrew Symonds. Masterful performance to play the aggrieved racially sledged victim when it was he who started it all. After being involved in so much controversy on the recent Indian tour why would you bother stirring the pot? Surely he must have known he was dancing on hot coals. Best supporting actor: Michael Clarke. Just when the world was starting to forgive him for standing his ground after edging to first slip in Sydney, he gives evidence that the judge struggles to believe against Harbhajan. An unreliable witness . . . that is a fair sledge against a player slated to be Australia's next captain. Best costume design: The Australian players who turned up to the Federal Court in Adelaide this weeking looking as if they were going to the movies. Best director: New Zealand Justice John Hansen, who might have made a mess of the hearing but at least he told some home truths. He was the first major voice to say that none of this would have happened if Symonds had not sledged Singh.

[Guest HariSampath]

DD.....can you carry a banner saying Bhajjis Doosra, with IndianCricketFans.com ? in the context of last week, you may be sure commentators would like to chat up that and so the TV cameras will show you for sure

[Guest HariSampath]

You can also try "ICC caught CA bowled BCCI" or any other combo

[anbuchelvan]

My 10yr old son behaves better than ponting.

[sreej]

Wake up and smell the prejudice In a north London pub on a warm summer's afternoon three years ago, I had an absorbing conversation with an English novelist friend of mine. We were talking about the cultural and political resonances swear words have in different countries. "So what would be a really insulting one in India?" my friend asked. "Er, in which language?" "Well, any language. Okay, let's say, in Hindi." "Sisterf***er," I said. "Mmm," my friend - celebrated in many countries for his irony and his urbane, polished prose - looked at me over the rim of his glass. "Now that doesn't sound too awful. If you'd called some of our Premier League footballers that, they might have told you, 'Yeah, and so?'" I sniggered into my drink. People from the adjacent table turned to look at us. We carried on. At the end of the afternoon, neither my friend nor I had any doubt that across the world as a whole, a racist slur would be the most unacceptable one of all: even Premier League footballers who would have found nothing objectionable about having a not quite uncorrupted relationship with their sisters would have been appalled and taken exception to a racist taunt. I thought of this conversation in the days following the reversal of Harbhajan Singh's ban, amid the howling maelstrom of outrage about whether India had flexed its financial muscle -- and if it had, by how much -- to have Australia and the rest of the cricket world cower at its feet. I thought of it because in that swirl of emotions we Indians have tended to lose sight of a problem we need to tackle: we are still in denial that we are a deeply racist country. Often, we are racist although we are not conscious of being so. (It's time we were.) We, with our fondness for light skin tones, tend to be prejudiced against those with darker ones. We don't think of it as racism. But the world does. And it is. It can't go on. We need to grow up. A few examples. In the aftermath of the overturning of the ban, a board administrator was quoted as having said something like, "We shall not stand for our boys being called racists." Our boys? Racists? Gosh. Cue incredulity, shock, horror. (Denial.) When Andrew Symonds was taunted with monkey chants by the crowd in Vadodara, and then in Mumbai last year, I remember some of my colleagues - educated, affluent, urban Indians, all of them - saying, "Oh, so what's the fuss? The Australians say much worse." (Ignorance, unknowingness, denial.) "Monkey," they said, is hardly that offensive. To be fair, the term does not quite imply in India what it does in the UK or the US or Australia, though it's not good enough to say that any more. They were missing the point. And here is another example - from my own childhood. I grew up in a middle-class, educated Bengali household in Kolkata. The routine term to describe the complexion of someone like myself -- not fair, like some of the members of my extended family -- was "moila" (literally translated as "dirty"). The funny thing, I now find, was that no one thought much of having said it. It was uttered unselfconsciously -- if always with a bit of regret. They were missing the point too; but we can't afford to do that any longer. We need to first accept that as a nation, India is among the most racist in the world. African students on the streets of Mumbai will testify to that, as will black cricketers. Then, we need to be aware of the fact that a racist insult is the absolute worst thing that you can throw at someone; and finally, we need to unshackle ourselves from this mindset. All this is made tricky given India's complex, disconcerting, and often inexplicable relationship with colour. The festishisation of white skin in a brown-skinned country comes bound up with an irreconcilable sense of contradiction and a notion of, often unconscious, self-loathing. Creams and lotions that claim to lighten one's skin have for years comprised an industry worth many millions in India. Look at the matrimonial ads. Listen to some of the conversations in educated, affluent, urban households. And keep your ears pricked, particularly for the throwaway asides. In India, fair still equates to pretty, handsome, attractive. And the opposite? Well... But the point is this: Talking about cultural differences simply isn't good enough anymore in this context. Times have changed. We live in a global village. More and more societies are taking pride in their multicultural identities. Indians travel more than they ever did. The country has changed more rapidly in the past ten years than it did in the previous 50. We no longer have a choice but to be aware of global templates of racism and to be sensitive towards them. Unlearning our deeply entrenched notions of and responses to skin tone will take years, but being aware of things will be some sort of a start. The changing of a collective consciousness, of course, is a long process. But our international cricket players will need to be among the first to adapt, and quickly. It is convenient and fatuous to pretend that sport exists only for itself and that cricketers are merely sportspersons. It isn't. And they aren't. Cricket's place is at the heart of Indian popular culture; and to large swathes of the world's population, these cricketers exemplify India. They are India's global ambassadors. There is a lesson for Harbhajan and his mates, and for all of us, in the fact that the charge, once divorced from its racial connotation, was watered down. The lesson is that abusive language is less of an offence internationally than a racist taunt; that a Hindi phrase that isn't, well, terribly respectful towards someone else's mother is seen to be less criminal than calling that someone a monkey. The sooner we learn that lesson, the better it is for Harbhajan -- and the rest of the country. It will help us grow up. Soumya Bhattacharya http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/current/story/334413.html

[anbuchelvan]

Ponting will be remembered as a cheat who uses synthetic bat ,claim false catches.

[mhr123]

:hysterical:

[mhr123]

Australian definition of 'hard but fair'—filth on the field and a beer off it ---- So we say Hansen Verdict is Hard but fair... and Its Symonds who got away with a major punishment not Bhajji as its proven that he himself started all this.:finger:

[Rajan]

In the whole episode, one thing puzzles me. i dont see Clarke any where near Bhajji and Symmonds. i can see Hayden close by.at least he can claim that he heard" symmonds telling to bhajji that u just called me a monkey". but clarke?

[Ranvir]

I agree that people in India are very racist. My aunt from India has visited us here in England the past two summers and has said some shocking things about black people. She says they scare her just by the way they look. I have also heard the mongoloid Indians (the ones who look chinese) get called Chinky. It's disgraceful. We need to stop the obsession with light skin. We're brown (different shades) and we should accept it. When you get guys like Shah Rukh Khan advertising skin lightening cream then its just sad. Imagine the dark kids who want to have have fairer skin like Shah Rukh Khan, they are being told that light skin is better than dark skin.

[talksport]

:haha:

[MundaPakistani]

Scary stuff! A lot of it applies to Pakistan too.

[talksport]

Good One.... Robert Craddock Did not touch Tendu though...when it all started with a Text Message