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According to Peter Roebuck, in a stunningly sanctimonious piece in this weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald, cricket is facing ”The Race of our Lives.” This is all to do with the monkey-calls that overshadowed the just completed ODI series between India and Australia. With jaw-dropping pomposity, he claims this is all on a par with the fact that West Indian captains were all white until the 1960s as a continuation of racism as the ongoing obstacle to the beauty and purity of cricket. “ Racism is the plague of the world. Every truly great man of history has stood against it, and all have failed to eradicate it. Still it endures, hateful, loveless, limiting. Like all diseases, it comes and goes but never entirely disappears, eating away at immature brains, unsettling nations, creating divisions founded upon suspicion and superficiality. Wow, forget ball-tampering, dodgy actions, the rise of 20/20, rebel tours, the Zimbabwe situation, how Kenya can be nurtured, declining playing numbers in the West Indies, modernizing test cricket into a coherent competition; Roebuck thinks he’s identified the biggest blight on the game. And by God, Australia is going to fight this head on. While Sportsfreak does not condone racial discrimination in any form, it is only right to look at this from the boundary.
Symonds was abused because he is a knob. Take your pick for the specific reason: he had an on-filed run-in with Sreesanth in the first game, he has a ridiculous hair-do, everything he has ever done in the field is over-theatric, and then there’s the outrageous lip gloss clown make-up mask. Where do you start? It is pathetic lip paint that probably leads to the racial abuse. Being English, Symonds should realise that the white monkey lips is straight out of the Black and White Minstrel show. So a monkey call, while unpleasant, has some inevitability about it. Focusing on the show-pony fielding, for example, is not so straight-forward. And is it really that much more offensive than the time-honoured approach of 20,000 Darrens and Darryls standing and chanting “Hadlee is a wanker”? All this tends to get overlooked in Australia, but the next few months are going to be fascinating. First of all it’s Sri Lanka’s turn, in a tour likely to be dominated by Murali’s push to surpass local hero Shane Warne as test cricket’s leading wicket taker. This is Murali’s first test series in the Lucky Country since he was no-balled out of the series in 1996 by local umpire Darryl Hair. He missed the last trip. That was the series where Darren Lehman received a small token suspension for racially abusing the Sri Lankans in their dressing room. And then it’s the Indian rematch. Clearly Sreesanth will get the attention of the Australian crowds. That is fair enough; he is reviving the sadly fading tradition of mad fast bowlers, and he has come out in the media predicting a 4-0 whitewash to the tourists. But all eyes will be how it is done. Because if there are signs of the hateful, loveless, limiting nature of the abuse that ruins the world then this outrage will be exposed for what it has the appearance of. The bullies do not like the taste of their own medicine.
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