Behind the platitudes of the joint statement on the Harbhajan issue lay three weeks of diplomacy, shadow-boxing and outright brinkmanship in one of cricket’s biggest recent crises
Siddhartha Vaidyanathan at Adelaide29-Jan-2008
The appeal, usually heard in a week’s time, was pushed back by the ICC to the end of the Test series in a clear effort to defuse the tension and work out a compromise © Getty Images
A day that began with speculation over the future of the tour ended with the two teams issuing a joint statement that sought to bury the past and look at the cricketing battles ahead. Behind the smiles and the platitudes, though, lay three weeks of behind-the-scenes diplomacy, shadow-boxing and outright brinkmanship in one of cricket’s biggest recent crises.The events in Sydney, when Harbhajan Singh was banned for three Tests for a racist abuse against Andrew Symonds and subsequently appealed against the sentence, pitted cricket’s best-run national board against its wealthiest board and the main question was, which side would blink.The stakes were raised high in the immediate aftermath of Mike Procter’s decision to ban Harbhajan, when the Indian board officially said the fate of the tour was linked to the racism charge being dropped. The appeal, usually heard in a week’s time, was pushed back by the ICC to the end of the Test series – 23 days after the first hearing – in a clear effort to defuse the tension and work out a compromise.The BCCI then despatched IS Bindra, a key aide of Sharad Pawar’s and a former president of the Indian board, to Australia. Bindra, who arrived a week ago, is a veteran deal maker with vast experience in negotiations; it is learnt that he held extensive discussions with the Cricket Australia chairman, Creagh O’Connor, over the past week, including Monday afternoon. He would have impressed on CA the financial implications of the current impasse in the immediate future – the CB Series – and the longer term, including Australia’s tour of India later this year. There was also a concern surrounding Australian participation in the BCCI-backed Indian Premier League.These concerns were voiced more explicitly by Lalit Modi, a BCCI vice-president who is in charge of the IPL. The damage to the Australian image in India could prove very costly, Modi said. “We sincerely hope there is no impact [on their involvement in the IPL],” he told the Sydney Morning Herald. “It will be for the team owners to decide. But there definitely will be some casualties from the feedback we are getting.”Things took a more curious turn on Monday when John Hansen, the appeals commissioner, read out a strangely-worded briefing, suggesting fresh evidence could be admitted in the appeal process. At one level this set off more frenzied activity, with Indian officials protesting against the probable inclusion of transcripts from the stump microphone and reiterating that nothing less than dropping the racism charge would be good enough. But perhaps the subtext of Hansen’s statement was that both sides could change their stand – and it is possible that this opened up the space for wriggle room.Ever since Sydney, the Indian camp’s one-point agenda was to reduce Harbhajan’s charge from Level 3.3 to 2.8, which does not involve racism; once the Australians agreed to that, it was only a matter of Harbhajan Singh admitting he had indeed used offensive language (not amounting to racism) and accepting the 50% fine it carriedEven as Bindra and O’Connor were talking, legal experts from the Australia Cricketers’ Association (ACA) got into the act; one of the ACA lawyers was seen near the Australian dressing-room on the final day of the Adelaide Test. Later that day, senior Indian players met team officials, which was followed by a high-level meeting between officials of both sides to broach the idea of a joint statement. Indian team officials began work on the statement, which was eventually presented to Hansen when the hearing began on Tuesday, and continued till 5 am on Tuesday; the draft was eventually approved at 9 am. The deadlock seemed to have been broken.All along, though, the Indian board upped the ante. It was decided that members of the Test side who were part of the one-day squad should stay back in Adelaide till the end of the hearing and that the seven new ODI reinforcements fly in from Melbourne, where they would be playing a Twenty20 match against Australia on Friday. Officially it was a show of solidarity, yet it was eerily reminiscent of the days following the Sydney Test, when the squad delayed its transit to Canberra and the tour was deemed “suspended”.Yet the solution was always at hand. Ever since Sydney, the Indian camp’s one-point agenda was to reduce Harbhajan’s charge from Level 3.3 to 2.8, which does not involve racism; once the Australians agreed to that, it was only a matter of Harbhajan Singh admitting he had indeed used offensive language (not amounting to racism) and accepting the 50% fine it carried. Symonds, incidentally, admitted to provocation, as he had at Sydney.And so when Sachin Tendulkar arrived at Adelaide’s Federal Court on Tuesday morning with Creagh O’Connor, it was clear that all parties concerned were aiming at – or had already reached – a workable solution.
