Sports: Cricket; Ugly Turn

Business

India Today
November 2,1998

CRICKET
Ugly Turn

A controversy over Harbhajan Singh's bowling action puts his career in jeopardy. Was the crisis aviodable?

By Rohit Brijnath and Ramesh Vinayak

Harbhajan Singh The television anchor was lying, the news was an obscene joke, this was a nightmare come visiting the wrong home. It had to be. "How can this happen to me"? he said to himself, the young Sikh with the lost-schoolboy face. He trembled. "How can my action be incorrect, I've reached where I have due to this very action?"

But the tinny voice on the television was telling the truth, each sentence like a rusty nail being driven deep into his bowling hand. It said the International Cricket Council (ICC) had stated that his action required remedy; it said the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) had directed the selectors to drop him for the Wills International Cup; it said his future was uncertain. It was his life, taken and put through a shredder.

Only in March this year, joy was rebounding off these same walls, on that day when he packed his twelfth class uniform with MGM Public School written on it in mothballs and drew on a shirt that said INDIA. The schoolkid who chased cricketers for autographs now had to sign his own name; the kid who sat rooted to the television was being invited for interviews by Jalandhar Doordarshan (he was too shy to go). "That day everything changed, particularly the way people looked at me."

Now, seven months later, in his Jalandhar home, despair drenching those walls, Harbhajan Singh was fighting to keep his eyes from welling up. How would people look at him now?

There'd been no whispers in the wind, no gossip on streetcorners. "No, never," he says emphatically, "no one pointed anything out to me." Not Bob Simpson, not Anshuman Gaekwad, not the BCCI. "It was a bombshell," says Bishen Bedi.

No it wasn't.

Many of these people, the BCCI office-bearers included, knew about a possible problem in Harbhajan's action as early as June this year. That the off-spinner's arm would straighten occasionally. Yet, inexplicably, they chose to keep quiet.

Let's start from the beginning, with Bedi, a spinner himself and a man comfortably devoid of all subtlety, saying, "If Harbhajan chucks then Muralitharan should be going to the Olympics for javelin." He's not finished. "The whites can't accept the fact that we can turn the ball on any surface." Conspiracy theorists agree: with 1,084 balls bowled for India over two Tests and 13 one-day internationals, you'd think someone would have "called" this kid. Either he chucks or he doesn't. Not so easy, explains an ICC umpire: "One type of bowler is a clear cut chucker. But others are not so obvious, and the match referee after discussion with an umpire may put his suspicions in his report." Match referees Peter van Der Merwe and Ranjan Madugalle, who officiated in the series in India this year, raised such suspicions about Harbhajan in their confidential reports to the ICC.

The ICC then sent videos of Harbhajan to its committee that includes Kapil Dev (India), Brain Basson (South Africa), Javed Burki (Pakistan), Michael Holding (West Indies), Doug Insole (England), Ranjan Madugalle (Sri Lanka), John Reid (New Zealand), Bob Simpson (Australia), Andy Pycroft (Zimbabwe), Nigel Plews (umpires' representative) and Clyde Walcott (chairman). After a teleconference, a letter was sent to the BCCI that "questioned the fairness in Harbhajan's delivery action". Problem was Kapil wasn't party to this process.

Upset, he says, that the ICC hadn't involved him in its decision making process over Muralitharan. Kapil didn't take part in the teleconference. "I didn't get any call and neither was I interested." He also sees a certain incompleteness in the process: "Seeing videos is not everything. In taking such a big step you need to sit down and discuss everything, who complained and what happened. There should be more transparency." When India Today mentioned that most of its queries had been met by a stern "that's strictly confidential" by the ICC, he barked, "Is playing with someone's career confidential?"

In the BCCI an even stranger story was unfolding. Sometime in June, the match referees' reports landed on BCCI Secretary J.Y. Lele's desk. "It was written," he says, "that they had referred his action to the ICC. (So) it was already hinted to us."

So, was Gaekwad, who now says "Harbhajan's one of my main bowlers, so it's a big blow to us," told? No.

Was captain Mohammed Azharuddin, who leads India on tours to Bangladesh, Sharjah and New Zealand and feels Harbhajan could be Allah's gift to a spin-deprived nation, told? No.

Was a young small-town boy, who repaired his house with his first earnings, whose dreams were about to have acid tossed on them but at least could have started all over again, told? No.

"An umpire hadn't called him so we decided not to take any action," says Lele. "So we kept it a secret."

Like some fairy tale turned seedy, each chapter offers a grimmer tale. India Today has learnt that at the Chennai camp last month Simpson, as India's consultant coach, raised the issue of Harbhajan's action in some quarters. BCCI President Raj Singh Dungarpur says, "such matters are confidential", yet he must confront this reality. If Simpson did not tell the board of his suspicions he is not worth his fee; if he told the board who chose to disinterestedly file it away then it is as absurd. And once again Harbhajan was not told. Not then, not even later. Instead of the decency of a quiet phone call from the BCCI in advance of his controversial dropping, a sort of warm official arm draped comfortingly around the frail shoulders of a disappointed man, he had to hear of his insult in the impersonal nakedness of the television news.

And people wonder why the BCCI never fought for Harbhajan like the Sri Lankans did for Muralitharan!

In this small incident, much of the character of Indian cricket finds itself under scrutiny. One last sad tale remains. All teams are stuck together with different glues, some bond better than others. When Muralitharan got "called" in Australia in 1995, the team became his cushion. Captain Arjuna Ranatunga, worried about him, once mentioned, "I invited him out for dinner constantly. Then I found so had everyone else and he had two invitations a day." When Harbhajan got a boot in the back, not an Indian team member telephoned him except Ajay Jadeja. (And, to his credit, Lele.) Half a year or so after the Murali incident, Sri Lanka won the World Cup. When the adhesive is brotherhood teams tend to go much further.

Harbhajan has not whined. He has instead behaved like an 18-year-old wearing an older man's composure. "I won't rest till I clear the ICC's objection, I've a long way to go in my career and I'm sure this is a minor crisis," he says. His words have fight but you know inside his chest his heart moves to an arrhythmic beat. The unsure beat of the nervous. That INDIA shirt in his cupboard; when is he going to wear it again?

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