By IANS
Brisbane : Harbhajan Singh has joined Douglas Jardine, John Snow, Richard Hadlee and Arjuna Ranatunga in becoming the latest overseas cricketer to “drive Australian fans off their trolleys”, local media has reported.
“No matter what the merits of the Harbhajan Singh case, at least it can be said it has put cricket back in the news,” wrote the Courier Mail, referring to the alleged racial abuse case involving Australian Andrew Symonds.
Recalling an incident involving New Zealand Richard Hadlee, it said that when the fast-bowling champion was almost crushed by the attention on tours here in the mid-1980s he initially decided the best way of tackling it was to return fire and try to fathom its meaning.
“He (Hadlee) wrote a newspaper article in which he questioned the way Australian parents raised their children, which had the effect of throwing a full tank of fuel on a fire already blazing out of control,” it said.
“Just as the pressure was turning him inside out, Hadlee was saved by Greg Chappell who took him aside and spelt out the blunt facts of life. Greg said to me, Richard, you are making so much trouble for yourself by biting at everyone who baits you – for God’s sake, just settle down and play the game and realise the crowd attention is a back-handed compliment,” Hadlee had written then, said the paper.
“It was the best advice I ever got.”
Australian supporters always sensed they could prick Hadlee’s skin, if not totally slip under it.
“They never sensed it with feisty Sri Lankan (captain) Ranatunga who could have been a crocodile in another life, so thick was his skin. Far from being intimidated by Australian taunts, he actually thrived on them,” the paper said.
“He was the first cricketer around the globe to declare he had no fear of Shane Warne. And when Warne accused him of lacking respect for Australia’s cricketing culture he returned fire with the stinging, unforgettable volley: ‘Don’t talk to me about culture. We go back 5,000 years. Your country has been around five minutes’.”
The paper went on: “Warne grew to loathe Ranatunga so much that one night in a one-dayer in Adelaide when Glenn McGrath was at the top of his mark about to bowl at Ranatunga, Warne jogged from slip with the simple message: ‘Pigeon, kill him’.”
Former England fast bowler Snow was once grabbed by an irate spectator after he hit Terry Jenner in the head in Sydney in 1970-71.
“The son of a vicar and an intense, brooding man, Snow looked as if he had been recruited from the set of a British cop show where he would have comfortably passed as a suave, sombre stand-over man. Australian fans baited him partly because he was so good, but the wealthiest Australian fan of all, Kerry Packer, secretly idolised him,” it said.
When Packer signed South African great Barry Richards and Snow, then 36, for his rebel World Series Cricket in 1977 he called them into a London hotel room.
“Well Barry, you are a great player and it’s nice to have you. And Snow, I know you are a has-been and I can’t believe I’m signing you. I’m only doing it because I love you,” said Packer, according to the paper.
Former England captain Jardine, the man who invented ‘Bodyline’ bowling, had the toughest job of all of the anti-heroes in Australia.
“It was one thing to have the outside world against him, quite another to have teammates as well. But his cast-iron will never buckled. A dour, remorseless Scot, he referred to Australians as ‘the lower classes who got away’,” it wrote.
“Asked by the Australian media if they could get team changes to suit their editions, he replied: ‘I select my teams for my country, not to suit your bloody papers’.”