"Time to move on." As words go, they are certainly preferable to "monkey" and "bastard". But how exactly does cricket move on from Bollyline if it fails to address one of its most fundamental failings? It is one that has been levelled at just about everyone involved in the Sydney Test, but might equally apply to every stakeholder in the game today. Step forward double standards.
Let's ignore for a moment the conciliatory sounds coming from down under, where Ricky Ponting and Anil Kumble are all smiles after a clear-the-air meeting which reflects well on the diplomatic skills of the ICC match referee Ranjan Madugalle. Instead, let's consider all the recent blather about the Spirit of Cricket, the holy ghost of sporting concepts and one so ethereal it's no wonder the players - sentient beings who inhabit the real world - struggle to live up to it. As Mike Atherton put it in the Sunday Telegraph: "No other sport, save golf perhaps, sees itself in such pure, mythical terms."
And yet it is very much how cricket - or at least a certain section of cricket - sees itself. Now of course it isn't nice if grown men call each other names, whether or not a monkey is worse than a ba$tard in one culture and a bastard worse than a monkey in the other. But as long as the rest of the cricketing world - this column included - colludes to create an atmosphere in which the players are under far more pressure than they ought to be to win a game played on a green field with a bat and a ball, then the occasional Sydney will keep cropping up - regardless of platitudes about respect for cricket and its traditions.
It's a measure of the sport's ability to disappear up its own behind that objections to the Harbhajan/Symonds spat concern damage to the game's image as much as the pathetic sight of two adults behaving like gits to each other. Why not an appeal to the players' humanity rather than pious pleas on behalf of an ethos that has never really existed?
That is why the promises to behave at Perth are barely worth the clichés they were spoken in. Because if the rest of us continue to demand a game full of passion, that passion will continue to be amplified in the middle and it will, sometimes, spill over.
We - the fans and the pundits - will go on demanding complete commitment, we will go on criticising batsmen for getting out (it happens from time to time) and bowlers for sending down half-volleys. We will call them disgraces to their respective nations and we will make sure damn sure they do not want to fail. We will publish books tittering at sledging and laugh about jokes concerning wives and biscuits. And then we will invoke the spirit of cricket when the players fail to live up to a set of ideals that are written in a book.
We will, in other words, continue to get the game we deserve. Oh, and did anyone else notice the fact that in this new-found atmosphere of mutual trust, Australia and India yesterday agreed to drop the plan to accept a fielder's word on the question of border-line catches? The spirit of cricket, it seems, remains as elusive as ever.
