Australian cricket is racial, unsporting

The just drawn third cricket test between India, Australia at Sydney ground will be remembered not only for great heroic rearguard action of Indian cricketers and also for the unacceptable racial behaviour of the Australian spectators, and also the condemnable unsporting behaviour of the Australian cricketers, including its current captain Paine and former captain Smith. The year ban imposed on Australian cricketers including the then captain Smith, involved in 'sandpaper gate' scandal in 2018, seems to have not changed the mindset, 'winning the match through hook or crook' of Australians.

Team Australia may be producing great cricketers but certainly not producing players with good sportsmanship. Australian cricketers are liked for their skill in the game but hated across the cricket playing nations because of their on-field behavior and their unprovoked 'verbal diarrhoea'. Their beastly bowling prowess and ferocious batting talent gave them the number one position in cricket arena for a long time. As other nations also grew in cricket and started producing great bowlers and batsmen the Australians have been challenged in their own game. Team Australia frustrated with their performance with both bat and ball seems to have developed the unsporting and cheating ways to win back the lost position in Test rankings.

Australian cricketers are established experts in sledging. The other cricketing nations, overwhelmed at the way the Australian teams were performing, largely failed to challenge their sledging for the fear of getting the label of bad losers. Taking advantage of this, the Australian cricketers successfully made sledging as part and art of cricket. Thus the game of gentlemen suffered because of that. Their chatter behind the stumps and from the slips is so unbearable that some of the Pakistan cricketers reacted violently at times. Indian players like Sachin, Rahul and VVS are so gentlemanly that they refused to react but replied with bat. The sole aim of sledging was to disturb the concentration of the batsman and force his to commit a mistake while batting.

The sledging and wordy duel on the field and off the field seems to have ingrained in the blood of the Australians. For, there appears a pattern in the way the cricketers of past and present start mouthing out unnecessary words whenever a series is approaching. The retired greats of the Australia start writing columns and comments in the channel interviews running down the visiting teams, whether it is India or England, with the kind of negativism which we rarely see in other countries.

It happened even at the beginning of the current tour of Indian team. The retired cricketers wrote columns labelling 'this Indian team as weakest, "they can't repeat this time what they did in the last tour" and "the Australian team will crush the Indian team" as they can't stand the pace battery of Australians were some of the words they used. Then they start a campaign like situation aiming at hitting the confidence of the visiting team batters and bowlers. Lot is written and said about at the weaknesses of those visiting cricketers using all their 'past experience', in fact some of them using the visuals of past dismissals. This is all intended to effect the morale of the players and also to inject some sort of suspicion in their art of batting and bowling.

The crushing defeat of Indians in the first test at Adelaide, where Indian team was bundled out for 36, their lowest total in recent test cricket gave the past and present Australian cricketers to exhibit "we said so" attitude. Never to lose a chance to hit the morale of the visiting teams the Australian commentators went overboard in writing in "sympathetic way" on the performance of Indian team in the rest of the three tests more so when their aggressive captain and best batsman left on paternity leave.

The Indian team seems to have hit Australians both in the ground and outside by outperforming the team Australia in all the fields of the game and scoring an emphatic 8-wicket victory in second test in Melbourne. The Australian 'experts' were silenced as they gave Indian team no chance to win except in Adelaide, where they lost badly and scored victory in Melbourne where the expert prediction was no chance.

It is in this background that the team Australia couldn't stomach the spirited performance in the third test. The racial abuse by the spectators started almost on the second day and went into fourth day, the new star Siraj and seasoned lion Bumrah were targeted with 'brown dog', 'go home' like words. That the other spectators have not objected to those insulting words confirms the racial mentality of the Australians. Till the players talked to their captain and umpires the abuses went on and even though the racial abuse is a punishable offence in Australia, those six suspected abusers were not booked but simply asked to leave the stands.

That unruly spectators when compared to the seasoned Australian cricketers is certainly innocent. The players have crossed all the decency which is expected of player representing his nation. The captain Tim Paine was leading his team in sledging. His frustration at the way the Ashwin and Hanuma Vihari fought brought out the typical Australian cricketer's 'toxic culture' out and started sledging to unsettle Ravichandran Ashwin. As the stump microphone has picked up Tim Paine's series of verbal jabs the Australian captain was forced to condemn himself about the behaviour.

The 'sandpaper gate' ball tamper leader Smith has not learnt any lesson from his punishment of earlier offence but went with his unsporting act of 'scuffing up' the batsman Rishabh Pant's guard at the batting crease. But there is no remorse in Smith despite being caught on camera about his scuffing act and netizens lambasting him as a habitual offender on the cricket field.

The sledging gang is exposed, the Australian captain Tim Paine who tried to disturb the concentration of Ashwin himself lost the focus and dropped three catches and helped India to draw the test. These are small things when compared to the wider issue of sporting image of cricket Australia and that seems to be unchanged for the present.