Slapgate - the IPL's first controversy

It’s the kind of moment sports writers like to refer to as ironic, when of course it is nothing of the sort. Harbhajan Singh’s alleged slapping of Sreesanth – or push, or comment, or tickle, or whatever it was that reduced Sreesanth to tears in Mohali last night – is all the more bizarre for occurring between players who, despite recent on-field tensions, would usually egg each other on while playing together for India. That’s the so-called irony part, even if irony in its simplest form is saying the opposite of what you really mean.

Ironically perhaps (just checking you’re still paying attention), Harbhajan detected genuine irony in Sreesanth’s supposed comment after the end of a match which extended Mumbai Indians’ losing streak to three. The details of Slapgate, as it will probably be dubbed, remain sketchy, but Sreesanth is reported to have approached Harbhajan with a smile and a “hard luck” – hardly grounds for a flailing hand, you might think, even if Bhajji sensed something other than sincerity in the remark.

Still, there is something of a delicious irony – you see, we just can’t help ourselves – in the fact that the Indian Premier League has been held up as a bastion of cross-cultural bridge-building (read: better relations between India and Australia), but has now sparked an incident between two players of the same nationality.

What must the Australians think of it all? They were fuming earlier in the year when Harbhajan’s three-match ban for allegedly calling Andrew Symonds a monkey was overturned, and were not exactly on Christmas-card-exchanging terms with Sreesanth either. I wonder if a small, unworthy, part of them actually chuckled at last night's farce.

But, really, could you have selected two players more likely to have engaged in handbags at the end of a must-win match for both sides? I remember a one-day county game when Mark Ilott of Essex and Robert Croft of Glamorgan – two of the circuit’s more talkative members, but hardly angry young men by nature – squared up as the game grew tense. There was a lot of talk back then about the sullying of cricket’s fabled spirit, but this time the IPL will probably take the extra attention it receives and move on.

Heck, at least Sreesanth and Harbhajan both play for India. Now, if it had been Symonds doing the slapping/pushing/swearing/tickling, we really would have a full-scale emergency on our hands. And how, er, ironic would that have been after what happened over the winter?