If you're interested, you'll know by now about the almighty stink coming out of the Sydney Test between Australia and India; and if you aren't interested, then you aren't interested.
Australia won the game in the penultimate over, thereby equalling the record set by Steve Waugh's team of winning 16 Test matches in a row; but there was a lot of bad feeling about the result, because of poor umpiring decisions, the spirit in which the game was played, and an accusation of racism. I offer some comments here under four relevant headings.
Spirit of the game: Some people dismiss the idea as no more than cant, but I don't, and as a longtime supporter of Australia at cricket I think the Australian team could do themselves a favour and temper the toughness of their approach with a little more effort at ordinary sportsmanlike generosity. There's nothing wrong with playing all-out to win, with being relentless in that. But given their cricketing power and resources over recent years, they could try to carry these with more dignity and less mean-mindedness than some of the tales of Australian sledging point to.
Racism: There are contrasting emphases on the incident between Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh in two pieces by Mike Marqusee and Gideon Haigh. I'm inclined to split the difference between them. I think Mike is right to say that calling Symonds a monkey is a racist insult; but in the circumstances that produced the insult the Australians would have done better to make informal representations about it, as they have before, than to lodge a formal complaint.
Bad umpiring: The Indians came off badly from some poor decisions - of that there is no question. But it is this issue and the next one that persuade me that the story has two sides. Poor umpiring decisions are an ineradicable part of cricket, though not every Test has as many of them as this one did. They are due to elementary human fallibility. You can have a discussion as to how far - and how - technology should be used to assist in improving umpiring decisions; and you can have another one about what mechanisms there should be for removing umpires from Test duties when they have a poor record. But the rest is, frankly, hot air. A team that is on the wrong end of a poor decision, or of a series of them, will feel aggrieved; that's to be expected. But until players start lamenting the fact, and protesting, that poor decisions have gone in their favour, and until they stop appealing for rather iffy lbw or bat-pad chances in the hope of swaying the umpire, moaning that things have gone against you is just unseemly.
Not 'walking': Complaints about this are, likewise, unseemly. It is not a new issue. It's been going at least as long as I've been following the game. Some batsmen 'walk' when they know they've touched the ball and it's been caught, and others don't. There's no obligation on them to do so, according to the rules of the game. They're perfectly entitled to stand their ground. Batsmen are sometimes given out when they aren't out, and the typical reaction of the side in the field when that happens is to celebrate.
Given everything that was in the mix, it's not surprising that there was bad feeling about the result. But to my eye, this isn't just a case of 'big bad Australians' at fault.