The last laugh!

Harbhajan singh has been banned from further IPL league matches. He will be allowed to play the semi final matches if his team reaches the semi finals, which is highly unlikely. Harbhajan apologised to Sreesanth again in front of the hearing committee, and said that he won’t be appealing against the verdict (wise decision!). Sreesanth has been given a written warning on his on-field antics. Even thought the BCCI enquiry is pending, it is believed that Harbhajan won’t be punished twice for the same mistake. Hopefully things will be better from now on. Hopefully the new young players of the team will learn something from this incident. Games like 20-20 needs aggressive playing, but aggression and rudeness are different. Sreesanth wisely tried to downplay the incident, may be he knew that it is not going to go unnoticed, when there are 45 cameras looking at them in all the angles possible, and there are lots of eyewitnesses including his team owners. Harbhajan kept silence about it throughout, may have realised that is the last favour he can do for himself at the moment.

Now that he got a break from continuous playing and travelling, Harbhajan can join a rehab clinic for anger management. He is a wise cricketer, wise enough to know that this time he escaped narrowly from a life ban. Sreesanth also can be happy about getting beaten up by Harbhajan and not Andrew Symonds (can you imagine that ?!). Everybody remember the Indian tour of Australia where Harbhajan caused constant problems with the Australian team. Every time BCCI came to his rescue and the racism issue was so close, but again Sachin tendulkar’s presence in the crease saved him. Harbhajan was there in the centre of every on field spats, where as Sreesanth has been lucky, got away with everything all the time. There are many players in the world of cricket happy about Harbhajan’s “holidays” at Sreesanth’s expense. Everyone who knows both these players must be knowing that whatever happened was inevitable, and there isn’t a lot of surprise about it.

Now, who has the last laugh? Sreesanth? Yes, he won the case, but the real happy smiles will be on the faces of Matthew Hayden, Andrew Symonds, Ricky Ponting, cricket Australia and ofcourse Fox sports and Channel nine.

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