Monkey business

UMPIRE'S POST

Should what happened on the field stay on the field?

With the dust settling down on Sydney's "monkey" business, now is a good time to rake it up again. George Orwell aptly described sport as war minus the shooting. It gives countries a chance to meet and test each other without using weapons.

Sport influences national pride and mood. It is only apt that the field of play would see passion, anger and heartbreak. Once these are present, can gamesmanship be far behind? Why link it to racism?

Some reports suggest that Harbhajan had merely wanted to insult Symond's mother. In Hindi, that can sound suspiciously like monkey without the third letter from the left and with the "o" replaced by an "a".

Instead of settling the issue with a head butt, like Zidane had, Symonds and his mates decided to take it to the match referee's court, even though Australian teams over the years have insisted that what happens on the field should stay there.

What is so offensive about the monkey anyway? As an animal, it is certainly not inferior to the ox, to which generations of commentators have likened Mathew Hayden. At least, a monkey's description does mention the loss of any vital body parts. The monkey is also what grandparents have often called their grandchildren out of sheer affection.

Much worse has been spoken on cricket fields in recent years. McGrath and Sarwan have dragged wives on to the pitch. Gilchrist's opponents have raised questions about his son. One can assume that any India-Pakistan match has a liberal sprinkling of swear words involving mothers and sisters "" words which are often used as expressions of endearment, or substitutes for punctuation, in north India.

Sunil Gavaskar, who has managed to hold the post of the chairman of ICC's cricket committee despite his spicy columns and commentary, has done much worse.

"Millions of Indians want to know if it was a 'white man' taking the 'white man's' word against that of the 'brown man'," Gavaskar wrote about referee Mike Procter's decision to penalise Harbhajan.

Gideon Haigh, writing on Cricinfo, has reproduced parts of Gavaskar's Sunny Days that recount the Kingston Test of 1976 where Bishan Bedi famously declared his innings closed rather than risk further injury to his batsmen.

"To call the crowd a 'crowd' in Jamaica is a misnomer. It should be called a 'mob'.... Their partisan attitude was even more evident when they did not applaud any shots we played. At one stage I even 'demanded' claps for a boundary shot off Daniel. All I got was laughter from the section, which certainly hadn't graduated from the trees where they belonged...," wrote Gavaskar.

Clearly, cricket has become a lot less tolerant.