The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) officially wrote to Cricket Australia on Thursday asking for the quarantine measures for the Brisbane Test to be relaxed. But, the Aussie media has been defaming the Indian team on the matter for a long time.
Aakash Chopra, who has been analysing the developments since the start of the tour, has come out all guns blazing over the way Australia have used their media to get into the nerves of the visiting team.
“I saw it during the last tour as well that mental disintegration is practised in Australia. When Australia lost the Adelaide Test last time, coach Justin Langer spoke to the media that this is a team of ‘bad boys’ and they ‘bully’ the other team. I was like ‘bully calling a bully, what are you doing?’. Then after they won the Perth Test, the media created a buzz that India cannot win in Perth,” Chopra said in a video posted on his Youtube channel.
“Now a similar atmosphere is being built at Gabba that this Indian team cannot win at Gabba. I feel that Indian team is better placed if the match takes place at Gabba, because if we do a man-to-man marking, and if Steve Smith does not score runs, the weight is tilted towards the Indian side.”
Chopra is also of the opinion that contrary to the popular belief, it’s the Indian team who is likely to benefit from the Gabba wicket. Hence, the question of not wanting to play there because of the nature of the pitch and the history doesn’t stand.
“It is the Australian team who should think about playing on a different surface, on a more quicker pitch. But the atmosphere has been created that the Indian team does not want to play in Gabba and they are ‘chickening out’ because they are scared of the grass on Gabba surface,” he further said.
Further branding the Aussie media as the 12th man of the team, Chopra highlighted that the team would itself leak audio clips captured in the stump mic to the media in order to defame the opposite team.
“This is very typical of Australian media and this is how they behave. They became the 12th man. It happened during the last tour as well. They would leak a small video clip of how Ravindra Jadeja and Ishant Sharma are arguing, and the stump mic caught some abusive exchanges between the players.
“I mean how the media got hold of these clips? This is the whole system that is in place that a media story will come out, then former players will start speaking about it. The former players, on the last tour, started speaking in unison that this Indian team is really ill-mannered team, but they were tasting their own medicine.”
