Australian view: 'Ricky Ponting must go'

By Andy Hooper

While Indians have reacted furiously at the ban given to Harbhajan Singh for racial abuse and the umpiring of the second Test in Sydney, Australia's media appear to be turning on their own.

Ricky Ponting should be sacked as captain for his team's conduct during the match, according to one of the country's leading cricket writers.

	Wild thing: Ponting must be sacked, according to leading cricket writer

Peter Roebuck, cricket correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, described the Test as "beyond comparison the ugliest performance put up by an Australian side for 20 years".

Roebuck, the English-born former Somerset batsman, wrote: "If Cricket Australia cares a fig for the tattered reputation of our national team in our national sport, it will not for a moment longer tolerate the sort of arrogant and abrasive conduct seen from the captain and his senior players over the past few days."

He continued: "Ponting has presided over a performance that dragged the game into the pits. He turned a group of professional cricketers into a pack of wild dogs."

Roebuck said Michael Clarke, whose three late wickets sealed Australia's victory, cannot be promoted to the vice-captaincy, while the incumbent Adam Gilchrist and senior opening batsman Matthew Hayden "should be thanked for their services".

Meanwhile, The Melbourne Age argued that calls for sackings were "knee-jerk" and the threat to abandon the tour "non-sensical... Apart from anything else, the all-powerful television moguls here and in India would not countenance it".

The solution, the paper said, lay with the captains. "Ultimately, it must be Ponting. In cricket, the captain leads. He must stand up again. So must Kumble."

A "case of cultural differences" was how former captain Steve Waugh, writing in The Hindu, saw the Harbhajan affair. "Much of what is happening between the teams springs from an inability to understand each other's culture. For an Indian, calling someone a monkey is not a terrible insult, and certainly not a racist one."

At the same time... "If Harbhajan used 'monkey', he was asking for trouble especially after what had happened in India [when home fans taunted Andrew Symonds]."