I NEVER LIKED the politics in cricket, and a stint on Cricket Australia’s board only reinforced my feelings.

In particular, I still feel uncomfortable about the way our board handled the ‘Monkeygate’ controversy involving Andrew Symonds, who has West Indian heritage, and Harbhajan Singh of India in 2007–08.

The Symonds issue cropped up during and after the Sydney Test match against India in January 2008. It was a nasty match that Australia won narrowly, but there were some controversial umpiring decisions, particularly on the final day. There was a lot of angst on both sides, and it ended in a race scandal that threatened to split the cricket world and end the tour.

In hindsight, all the problems could be said to have begun during the world Twenty20 championship semi-final in Durban the previous year, when the Australian and Indian dugouts were placed side by side and there was banter going each way. India won that semi-final and went on to beat Pakistan in the final, but Symonds was quoted afterwards in a hint of what was to come: ‘We have had a very successful side and I think watching how we celebrate and how they celebrate, I think we have been pretty humble in the way we have gone about it. Personally, I think they [India] have got far too carried away with their celebrations. It has definitely sparked passion inside of us.’

The tension built. There was a one-day series in India in September–October 2007, and Symonds, who was Man of the Series, was racially abused by the crowds in Vadodara and Nagpur and then allegedly by Harbhajan Singh in Mumbai. After the seventh international of that series, there was a meeting to arbitrate between Harbhajan and Symonds in which the Australians claimed Harbhajan had called Symonds a ‘monkey’. The Australians left the meeting feeling that everyone had agreed the word was unacceptable; the Indians claimed later that the agreement was only to stop sledging each other. This point was important, because when Harbhajan and Symonds clashed in Sydney on day three of the New Year Test match, and Symonds believed he heard the Indian spinner call him ‘monkey’ again, he felt the Mumbai agreement had been broken.

After the Mumbai problem, the Board for Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) did nothing until the ICC pressured it to take action. In the end, the BCCI merely issued a joint statement with Cricket Australia condemning racism. The Australians felt the matter was over, but then in Sydney, Harbhajan, engaged in a furious battle with Brett Lee and, having slashed the Australian quick for a boundary, patted him on the backside with his bat as he trotted down the pitch, as if to say, ‘Bad luck.’ Harbhajan and Lee have a good relationship.

But Symonds saw the exchange differently, and he took offence. In his newspaper column of the time, Symonds said he believed he should back his teammate, Lee. ‘I’m a firm believer in sticking up for your teammate, so I stepped in and had a bit of a crack at Harbhajan, telling him exactly what I thought of his antics,’ he wrote. ‘He then had a shot back, which brings us to the situation we’re facing.’ At the end of Lee’s over, Harbhajan gestured for Symonds to come towards him. They walked a few steps together talking, although there was no outward sign of fury. Other players joined in, first Matthew Hayden, then Sachin Tendulkar, the non-striking batsman, then Ricky Ponting, the Australian captain. Symonds claimed that Harbhajan called him a ‘big monkey’; television footage of the exchange shows the Australian holding two fingers up to Harbhajan, indicating that this was the second time he’d been abused. Symonds was upset, and rightly so.

In the hearing that followed, Symonds, Hayden and Michael Clarke all said they’d heard Harbhajan Singh call Andrew Symonds a monkey, but the umpires didn’t.

Nothing was picked up through the stump microphones, and Harbhajan claimed he’d actually used the expression teri ma ki chut, a Hindi curse that translates as ‘motherf-----’. Both Harbhajan and Tendulkar claimed this had been misheard by Symonds and the Australians.

There was a huge amount of heat in the situation by the time ICC referee Mike Procter handed Harbhajan Singh a three-match suspension for racial abuse. The Indians felt slighted that their story wasn’t accepted, and the team soon threatened to go home with two Tests remaining.

Many Australians felt that India, 2–0 down in the series, were whingers. As tensions boiled between the two teams and the two countries, Harbhajan appealed, and the ICC brought in New Zealand High Court judge Justice John Hansen to hear the matter. Hansen threw out the racism part of the charge, and fined the spinner $3000, or 50 per cent of his match fee, for verbal abuse.

The downgrading of the charge enraged the Australian players, but Hansen criticised Symonds for misinterpreting the initial action by Harbhajan to Lee, the pat on the backside: ‘Anyone observing this incident would take it to be a clear acknowledgment of “well bowled”.’ Justice Hansen also acknowledged that an error by the ICC had contributed to the relatively light penalty imposed upon Harbhajan; the governing body had failed to reveal to the judge that the Indian spinner had been suspended several times before, including for a 2001 incident in which he was found to have attempted to intimidate an umpire.

I was on the Cricket Australia board at the time, and we ultimately accepted the ICC appeal finding and moved on, but it’s never sat well with me. We hung Andrew Symonds out to dry and at the time I was annoyed about it. I thought, ‘This isn’t right. Obviously something happened out there.’ We were encouraging – and the ICC was encouraging – players to report racial slurs and vilification on the field, but when it actually happened, it went nowhere. It got ugly.

When the Indians started to flex their muscles and threatened to go home, our players were very aggrieved. They felt that if the situation had been reversed and any of them had called someone a monkey, they’d have been hammered. They also felt that the earlier agreement from the Indian tour had been broken.

I was torn. Initially I was all for backing our players, but then the reality hit from a business point of view.

We were told we’d have a massive financial hole if the Indians went home, and we couldn’t afford it. Channel Nine as the broadcaster could sue us for not producing the days of cricket specified by the television-rights contract, and then we’d have to countersue India. India are all-powerful now, so we’d have had no chance. The realisation at board level was that we couldn’t have India go home. But morally and ethically we should have called their bluff and hoped the global community would hold them to order, even though I don’t think that would have happened.

Once we were aware of the commercial realities, we knew we had to back down a bit. Andrew Symonds was aggrieved, and it affected him deeply. His cricket suffered from then on, and I think that was the start of it. He had trouble coping with his notoriety as a cricketer. He wanted to go to the pub with the boys, have a few beers and not find himself pestered. He was such a big star in that period, and he had no peace. Ironically, he and Harbhajan later became IPL teammates for a while at Mumbai Indians, and I think they got along all right. Harbhajan knew how to push our buttons, that’s for sure. We play a hard game, but when someone plays a hard game against us, we’re inclined not to like it.

As for Symonds, he never let it go. “I think Cricket Australia was intimidated by the Indian cricket board,” he told the cricinfo website some time later:

“The thing, I think, that was grinding on me the most was the lying. Because the allegation was that this hadn’t happened, and it had. Then the lies started, and then it became political. The captain [Ricky Ponting] was made to look like a fool, and that should have never happened, and the other players too. If truth, honesty and common sense had prevailed then there’d have been a punishment for the player. It would have been dealt with and it would have set a precedent for the future.

That incident also hastened my departure from the board a little. The backroom deals were done, and I was out of my depth. They made the commercial decision, not the ethical/moral decision. Would India have actually stayed or gone home if we’d stood up to them? If they’d gone home, we’d at least have had the moral high ground.

We thought we had basic proof that we were right, that there’d been a slur, and the ICC should have got more involved. I believe ‘Symo’, who said he heard it, as well as Hayden, Clarke and Ricky, who also heard it, and they’re not inclined to make things up. In Harbhajan’s defence, I suppose there’s a chance they actually misheard what he said. Ultimately, the commercial realities and the dollars involved overran everything.

This is an edited extract from Cricket As I See It, published by Allen & Unwin and available from November 10. RRP $35.00. Purchase here: http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=94&book=9781760111809