Look at those Aussies. Butter just won’t melt in their mouths, will it? Neither will jelly beans, Rahul Dravid and friends may be inclined to clarify. Dravid, on his part, will probably banish the candies from his confectionary options. Never has a little jelly baby created such a storm. Ever since match referee Clive Lloyd got rivetted by television replays of the ODI at Brisbane that showed the Indian vice-captain staining the cricket ball with a mixture of saliva and yellow goo, every person with even a fleeting association with the game has stood up to voice an opinion. The charge of ball tampering is wrong, say his colleagues and fans, it was an accident, he should not have been docked half his match fee. Cricket’s finest ambassador cannot be happy about having his record stained by this absurd charge, adds coach John Wright. Lloyd is right in saying that he’s simply heeding clause 2.10 of the ICC’s code of conduct, that motivation figures nowhere in his censure. It’s only because of Dravid’s record that he’s been let off without any match suspension, he notes. Unlike, one supposes, Waqar Younis, Shoaib Akhtar and, oh dear, Sachin Tendulkar. But don’t even begin to imply that it could have happened to anybody. No, mate, it couldn’t have happened to the mighty Australians. Breaking the general agreement on Dravid’s innocence and noble intent, skipper Ricky Ponting says nobody’s going to see any of his team doing “anything like that”. Maybe the Indian cricketers were simply conducting a little experiment to see what effect a varnishing of jelly would produce, he reckons. Yet, this is the same Ponting who affirmed that nobody else from his team was going to be doing an Adam Gilchrist in a hurry — after the Australian wicketkeeper walked after nicking a delivery in the World Cup semi-finals last year, even after the umpire indicated not out. But the masters of sledging played for the goody-goody stakes even then. Gilchrist said one reason he walked was his frustration behind the stumps in preceding months when English cricketers stood their ground despite catching the edge, time and again. So, the lessons are clear. One, anyone seeking moral science teachers could tap the Aussie cricketing pool. Two, Dravid will rue the day he was nicknamed Jammy, for thence was writ his tryst with jelly scandals.
