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As many of you have gathered, we were away last week. We did say something somewhere, but we always get lots of ‘why aren’t you covering this?’ emails and comments even if we do make an ‘official’ announcement.
Anyway, it seems the big news was STILL Harbhajan Singh calling Andrew Symonds a monkey. We’re glad we missed it really. It’s never fun when ‘he said, she said’ matters are dissected in the media to no great effect. It was an unprovable issue from the start, but one that couldn’t be ignored. Expedient justice ensues.
We’re not going to get into a debate about whether being a racist is even a good thing any more. We’re not going to discuss exactly how clever it is. We’re not even going to put up an online poll as to whether racism or xenophobia is the best kind of bigotry.
But we will say this: If you’re going to get yourself banned for several matches for saying something stupid and clearly offensive, you’d at least want to say something remotely interesting or unusual.
And it is clearly offensive. If there’d been a big racism to-do about an opponent of yours being called ‘a monkey’ by the crowd during a match in which you yourself were playing, you’d know that you shouldn’t call them THAT EXACT SAME THING.
Bit tardy with this, aren’t you. Expect inundation from the self-righteous.
Meanwhile, the next Test is being billed here as the Monkeys vs. the Bastards.
Official Cricket Australia guidelines now forbid Queenslanders being called banana benders.
If we don’t get some misspelt, pedantic nit-picking that misses the main thrust of the story, we won’t be able to show our face around the other cricket blogs.
So, you’re stance is, if you do racism, do it snazzily? Perhaps make some reference to something unexpected? Like hedgehogs?
It’s the very worst kind of racism – the boring kind*.
*This is clearly not the worst form of racism. Genocide’s probably the worst form, but it’s not really a matter where relative degrees make much of a difference. It’s all pretty bad.
(Obviously we’re not saying that Harbhahan endorses genocide in that previous paragraph. Maybe relative degrees DO make a difference. We’re getting a bit uncomfortable about being flippant about racism now and we’re going to stop. Someone else can doubtless take up the torch at this point…)
I find being called a hedgehog offensive. I demand an apology, Atheist.
Racism aside, to allegedly call someone a monkey having allegedly being warned for the same thing in the ODI series is pretty stupid.
Perhaps Harbhajan should instead have suggested that Symonds is so much of twat, even the Brummies didn’t want him.
You love the racism. You’re all about it.
it’s sad.
The Scientician is conspicuously Dr Scientician now, everybody. Congratulations.
You’d think somewhere along the way to doctorhood, he would have learnt about capital letters though.
capital letters are for the lay.