India ask match referee to speak to Australians

The Indian team management has written a letter to Jeff Crowe, the match referee, about Australia's 'provoking' behaviour, which they feel triggered the latest spat involving Ishant Sharma in Sunday's one-dayer in Sydney. Ishant was summoned by Crowe for a disciplinary hearing on Monday morning and was docked 15% of his match fee for pointing Andrew Symonds back to the dressing room after bowling him.

Crowe booked Ishant for a Level 1.6 offence under the ICC Code of Conduct regulation. That section relates to "pointing or gesturing towards the pavilion in an aggressive manner by a bowler or other member of the fielding side upon the dismissal of a batsman."

"The umpires, based on what they had seen in the middle, reported to the match referee about the incident," Bimal Soni, the Indian team manager who was present along with Ishant at the hearing, told Cricinfo. "Our plea was Symonds provocated [sic] Ishant and that's why he did what he did. He [Crowe] promised he would be speaking with the Australian captain about the matter."

There has a been a lot of bad blood throughout the summer between India and Australia and it was in Sydney that the Harbhajan Singh-Symonds racism row began. Even on that occasion, the Indians felt it was Symonds' provocative language that triggered the incident. The situation reached boiling point with the Indians threatening to abandon the series if the three-match ban handed out to Harbhajan was not lifted.

This time around the Indian team management didn't want to escalate matters. But they have requested the match referee to haul up the Australians. "We could've filed another complaint but we didn't want to prolong another hearing. Instead we made the match referee aware that the Australian have provoking our players in the last two matches and cited specific instances, which is not good for our players," Soni said, as the Indian team was ready to board the flight to Hobart for their final league clash against Sri Lanka.