Still in Sydney, Team India waits

And that also explained the grim looks at 1.30 am here on the faces of skipper Anil Kumble, witness Sachin Tendulkar, manager Chetan Chauhan and Harbhajan Singh, the man in the centre of the racism storm that’s put Team India’s tour of Australia on pause.

By morning, the livid Indian team had decided to back Harbhajan to the hilt. Soon, there was an “informal” two-hour team meeting involving just the players. And then, even as some of players entered the team bus to proceed to Canberra as scheduled, it was decided that the team would stay put until the Board had walked the talk and actually filed its appeal against Harbhajan’s ban with the ICC.

In New Delhi, rattled by the strong message from the players, the BCCI rushed into a morning huddle at president Sharad Pawar’s house to firm up two appeals — one seeking to squash the ban on Harbhajan based on a “blatantly false and unfair” charge, and the other seeking to remove Steve Bucknor as umpire from the rest of this series.

Harbhajan has been banned for three Tests by Procter after Australian captain Ricky Ponting lodged a protest during the Sydney Test that India lost, alleging that the Indian off-spinner had called Australian all-rounder of Caribbean origin Andrew Symonds a “big monkey”.

However, the Indian camp has strongly denied the charge with the team management today conveying to the BCCI that they would not tolerate a racist tag on one of their players based only on the oral evidence of Australian players.

“How can the match referee go completely by the word of Mathew Hayden and Michael Clarke and prosecute someone? Everybody knows how truthful Clarke (he claimed a bump-ball as a catch to get Sourav Ganguly dismissed yesterday) can be, and there was no video proof of what they were saying. We are shocked. The vibes we got from the match referee wasn’t positive and it...