Everything is tickety-boo

Are they trying to make Sri Lanka the guinea-pigs of the cricket’s cold war that is bouncing around Down Under? At this end we get a very eerie feeling that it is so.

Not enough that Australia and India are embroiled thickly in it, now it seems that they need Sri Lanka’s participation in it too. May be then they can come out and say “Everybody is in it………so what?”

In a way I think it was very prudent of Sri Lanka skipper Mahela Jayawardena to laugh off the ‘egg throwing’ incident as a drunk’s prank who even did not recognise the Sri Lankan Champion spinner Muttiah Muralitharan who also happened to be present at the spot when the incident took place. However we are still to know if the incident occurred by design or just by coincidence as no one has been booked in as the culprit. However it is also intriguing to know that the normal Australian citizens are in the habit of carrying rotten eggs with them while moving about on their day-to-day activities and hurl them at unsuspecting Asians and also start jeering at them. Well… let god bless those poor creatures.

It was only last week that the famous Australian Newspaper “The Age” carried an article which tries to implicate the new Lankan cricket chief Arjuna Ranatunga as the person who triggered off all this antipathy in the game of cricket. It read “The biggest crisis since Bodyline" comes along at least once a year, and the example that is most relevant to the current brawl is the Arjuna Ranatunga scandal of 1999. This was the case that set the real precedent for today's crisis. Indeed, it was an earlier phase in the same process.

Ranatunga led his Sri Lankan team to the boundary of the Adelaide Oval after an umpire, Ross Emerson, queried Muttiah Muralitharan’s bowling action in a match against England in the 1998-99 triangular series.

For rejecting the umpire's authority and stopping the game for 14 minutes, Ranatunga faced five International Cricket Council misconduct charges.

His case was heard a week later in Perth. Five lawyers were present. Ranatunga's representatives said the wording of the charges was too loose to stand up in a real court, and that match referee Peter van der Merwe, as the ICC's representative, had no authority to bring the charges and then sit in judgement.From a strictly legal point of view, this was incontestable. The policeman can't be the judge. But from a moral point of view, Ranatunga's action undermined cricket's entire system of governance.

The ICC has no authority beyond what is given it by its member nations. Any member nation has an effective right of veto against any disciplinary act. It's as easy as packing bags and chartering a jet.

But civilisation, in cricket, depends on nations resisting that veto. In 1999, Ranatunga pointed out that the ICC could not tell him what to do. It could make a suggestion (in that case, a small fine and a suspended sentence), and if he was happy with that, the game could go on.”

Isn’t this a clear attempt to implicate Sri Lanka in this cold war?

Coming back to the egg throwing saga, now the Indians too have opened their minds into the possibility of an Indian player being subjected to a treatment of this nature and promptly have acted upon it.

According to the Indian Express “The BCCI has asked the Indian cricketers to be cautious about their movement in Brisbane after the incident of egg throwing on Sri Lankan off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan.

"Players have been asked to be aware of their surroundings, look around and be on alert if any mischief is waiting to happen," a high-ranking Indian board official said on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile even SLC CEO Duleep Mendis confirmed that they too have requested their players to be extremely vigilant and careful while perambulating on Australian streets.

Though the authorities have failed to bring the culprit to book, even Cricket Australia have acted upon this incident and according to The Age once again “Security around the hotel where the Sri Lankan team was staying in Hobart was increased on Thursday night after a group, including Muttiah Muralitharan, was pelted with eggs and abused.

While Sri Lankan coach Trevor Bayliss dismissed the incident as "a non-event", Cricket Australia was so concerned it arranged extra police guards.

The visiting side's chief selector, Don Arunasiri, was hit by an egg, while Muralitharan and two other team managers were verbally abused by a car-load of people as they were walking from a restaurant back to the hotel.

There is doubt as to whether the attackers were aware of the cricketers' identities, because they were not wearing team kit and it was dark. Regardless, the incident has occurred during a fragile period in relations between Australia and the subcontinent and will not reflect positively in the wider cricket community.

By and large there is much more than the naked eye can see in the developments of the issues taking place in Australia.

Taking the present status-quo into consideration I wonder how players cope with it. Behind the curtain there is a huge cold war raging between two very powerful cricketing nations on earth. At the other end the public who get enraged with these happenings react upon the players and the egg incident could be termed as a direct seedling of this cold war. Still the game goes on in the middle, but I just can imagine the stress factor that the players are subjected to. If the stress factor is confined only to India and Australia, Sri Lanka would be the direct benefactor and the end result can be translated into ‘big bucks’. “So why not get them also into this game called “stab in the back when you can”. Then every one will be on a level field. However this is the juncture when that famous saying comes into effect... “When the going gets tough, the tough gets going”. We can see the result by end February.