Little Did Zizou Know...PART II

Bat was his battleship. Pen, his sword.
With bat in his hand, he had denied the deadliest of fast bowlers the history of the game has ever seen. With pen in his fingers, he had successfully refused submission to the mightiest of the Blue-blooded cricketers and administrators.
Cricket, is clearly divided in Black and White, no questions. If you happen to be a Basille De’Oliviera or a Muttiah Muralitharan, you are supposed to be either thrown out of your country’s touring party, or called for throwing! There is no mid-way.
His is the loudest voice against this discrimination. True, Imran Khan and Arjuna Ranatunga did their best to be placed joint second, but SMG, as he was in reaching the milestone of ten thousand runs in test cricket, placed comfortably at the first place in his “Crusade” for making the Whites realize where they stand.
Like what is being preached in the Australian media – fully supported by the enlightened section of the Indian cricket media, too! – that Sourav Ganguly did not do justice to his stature of an international skipper by forcing the opponent skipper Steve Waugh to wait outside the Indian dressing room, in the 2001 series, before going to toss.
SMG was candid in his observation. What he wrote was: “It is the duty of the home skipper to go to the touring team’s dressing room to call him to go for the toss. If the touring skipper waits there with a couple of photographers from his own country that can never be the fault of the home skipper.” Truth, they say, is always as simple as this!
At the Grace gate of the Lord’s, he was denied entry to the ground by a security-person, necessarily White. His reply was again, simple. He refused to be honoured by the organization. He should not have done so, opined one of his teammates. For that teammate, MCC was omni-potent and any reward coming from the Whites, had to be accepted gladly. “Beg my pardon”, SMG distanced himself from such (whi)teasing thoughts!
When you go through his comments in one of his recent columns on the issue of security for the second edition of the IPL, you know where it hurt him the most.
“Of course in today’s world, no security can be foolproof anywhere in the world including England but does that mean sport should come to a standstill? More crucially, the question is if it was the Ranji Trophy clashing with the general elections would there be such a big issue made out of it as is being done with the IPL? Are we to presume that overseas lives are far more precious than Indian lives?”
He is definitely that voice of Indian cricket the Whites don't want to listen to!

- Kashinath Bhattacharjee