CRICKET RSS WORLD

From Ravi Kumar Putcha, Singapore

How do you defend someone who is so overtly aggressive? How do you try to make a case for the talent of the IPL’s much maligned and much abused bowler when it is the sideshow everyone seems to care for? It is not easy, but if players who use performance-enhancing drugs have a right of appeal and if bowlers called for chucking have a shot at rehabilitation what, crime has Sreesanth committed that we are all being so hard on him?

This whole thing started off with Matthew Hayden - 486 runs from 11 matches, the orange cap, and a good match against a guy returning from a long lay-off - and Hayden was off. People should have realised that for a player who called an opponent "obnoxious weed" and who thought nothing of the contradiction between calling India a "third world country" and then running after the money the Indian Premier League offered, even after retirement, calling a struggling quick an "overrated bowler" was no great leap of imagination or faith. Nor is this a big deal for a man who criticized his Indian opponents for batting for their ODI hundreds, only for Cricinfo to prove, with statistics, that the slowest player to go from 50 to 100 in ODIs at the same time he offered this precious gem was, unsurprisingly enough, Matthew Hayden.