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Some bitterness in the Australian cricketers is understandable. After all, losing a Test series so comprehensively is not easy to digest, and particularly against India at this point in time when their status as world champions is under serious threat. But Matthew Hayden’s excuse that his team fared badly because of the distractions of playing in a ‘Third World country’ is silly, supercilious and scandalous.

This stuff is from the medieval age, if you get what I mean. In the past, major players would skip a tour of the subcontinent because of worries about health, comfort, umpiring, (lack of) social life, boredom and so on. But that stereotype certainly has no place in the India of today, surely. Having come here for almost a decade now, what aspect of India bothers Hayden I wonder. International cricketers enjoy the best hotels, the best meals, the best parties, the best deals — the best of everything really. The amount they are fussed and fawned over would be the envy of matinee idols anywhere in the world.

The privileges in recent years extend not only to a terrific lifestyle, but also handsome money — from playing in T20 leagues, through product endorsements, cutting ribbons or attending promotional events, and the like. None of these are available to cricketers anywhere else in the world, and certainly not in Australia. Where I am concerned, such insensitive stuff diminishes the aura around Aussie cricketers further. The disappointment of defeat is best redressed by graceful acceptance, but Australia have whinged and whined right through the recently-concluded series. Hayden’s statements reveal this adequately: there is a reluctance to look within for reasons of defeat.

In 1980-81, when Sunil Gavaskar almost conceded the Melbourne Test match in protest against a harsh umpiring decision, he earned universal opprobrium, and in India too. Gavaskar was to say later that something had snapped in his mind not so much because of the decision itself, but because of the non-stop sledging of the Australian cricketers.

There can be no excuse for conceding a match, but in hindsight, Gavaskar’s objections must be seen as not entirely unfounded. In a sense, it is this mindset which manifests itself in the kind of statements that Hayden has made recently. It suggests a misplaced superiority complex, and has, at its worst, found expression in sledging.

Over the years, several cricketers from other countries have raised similar objections about the attitude of the Aussies, but this has got largely suppressed because of the clout Cricket Australia enjoyed in the ICC, or because of their undoubted cricketing supremacy. Steve Waugh had in fact given this some kind of romance by terming sledging as the ‘mental disintegration’ of the opponents.

Indeed, this aspect has baffled cricket aficionados and social scientists alike from a long, long time. Is it necessary to sledge to be brilliant? This should be seen as distinct from aggression, without which competitive sport is impossible. You can’t win if you don’t play hard, the issue being when does such ‘hardness’ become unacceptably intimidating?

I think some degree of ‘posturing’ is important because bluff and bluster have a big role in sport, and add to the excitement and enjoyment of the game. Little Eknath Solkar squaring up to Geoff Boycott and telling him, “You bloody mind your business, I will mine” when he was told how to bowl by the batsman takes nothing away from the fun and adds a great deal to the competitiveness. But there are obviously limits which must not be transgressed. The situation gets pricklier when a team that carries that air of misplaced superiority is confronted by players unwilling to take things lying down, as has happened with the younger bunch of Indian cricketers.

Indeed, Gavaskar in the ’80s was perhaps the lone voice trying to establish equality while other players could still be easily subdued by the reputation of the opponents. It’s a different scenario today, where every Indian player believes this, as the last couple of series has shown. Perhaps that is Hayden’s real bugbear?

Email: ayaz@dnaindia.net