NOT CRICKET: Sreesanth, (top) Harbhajan Singh and (bottom) a tearful Sreesanth after the slap

Till just the other day, there was nothing quite as good as giving it back to them. India, cricket lovers cheered, had finally come of age when it came to aggression and the killer instinct. They were no longer acting like plaintive sissies, asking to be bullied on the field by their opponents. Once diligent practitioners of the gentleman’s game, they were now pumped up with attitude. The message had been sent out loud and clear — Indians were not going to take it lying down.

Then Harbhajan Singh slapped S. Sreesanth. And suddenly, on-field aggression by our cricketers isn’t looking quite so agreeable anymore.

We may have rejoiced when Sourav Ganguly took off his shirt and whirled it from the balcony of Lord’s after India’s victory in the 2002 NatWest Trophy final. Or when Zaheer Khan responded to English cricketer Kevin Pietersen’s sledging last year by waving his bat menacingly at him. Or when Sreesanth broke into impromptu break dances to peeve his opponents, and a brazen Harbhajan Singh allegedly called Andrew Symonds a monkey (or was it a Hindi expletive?) and got away with it.

But one slap, along with a burst of tears, has now put all those celebrations on hold. Questions are now being asked if on-field aggression justifies such ugly incidents. And if the April 25 Harbhajan-Sreesanth fracas is an indication of the shape of things to come.

Once, Bishen Singh Bedi chose to forfeit an innings in reply to the bouncers his team faced during the 1976 Caribbean tour. Sunil Gavaskar, after falling prey to Dennis Lillee’s intimidations in 1981, walked off the pitch, with batting partner Chetan Chauhan in tow. All humble gestures, these. But in the aftermath of the Harbhajan incident, and the Sourav Ganguly-Shane Warne tiff on May 1 which led to both being fined 10 per cent of their match fees, many cricket lovers are wistfully looking back on those dignified, gentlemanly gestures and wondering if aggression has not come at too great a cost to the spirit of the game.

But the optimistic are still betting on India managing to deal with its newfound aggression. “Every disease breeds its own medicine, and I’m sure this excessive aggression will also level out over time,” says cricket writer Kishore Bhimani. “But at the moment, we do seem to have a crisis on our hands,” he says.

And this “crisis” is not without reason. “The coming of financial affluence and the fact that we’ve started performing better recently have brought about a sense of heightened confidence in our players. Somewhere, that confidence is tending to turn into arrogance,” says former cricketer Chetan Chauhan.

Money, clearly, has played spoilsport to an extent. In the 1970s, cricketers were paid Rs 10,000 for every Test match, and Rs 2,000 per one-dayer. An overseas tour left players richer by about Rs 1 lakh, less than what top players earn in a single one-day match these days. Besides, there was no sponsorship, corporate contracts or multi-million rupee domestic deals.

But with the Indian Premier League, the worth of a cricketer is being measured in terms of auctioning lots. Even a player from the Ranji Trophy level has an annual base salary of $50,000 (about Rs 20 lakh). Harbhajan will lose upward of Rs 2.5 crore for not being able to play the rest of the league. Big guns such as M.S. Dhoni and Ishant Sharma have also raked in several crores through players’ auctions.

“If the game is run by mercenaries, you are bound to get mercenary-like behaviour,” is how former India cricketer Utpal Chatterjee puts it. “And when aggression spins out of control, we get ugly incidents like the slap,” he says.

Psychologists point out that mega bucks at an early age can often lead to behavioural problems. “When youngsters come into big money, they tend to become non-serious about their business,” says psychiatrist Sameer Parikh. “That inevitably manifests itself in poorer performances, which in turn leads to frustration and anger, since sportspersons know that if they fail to perform they may never get a second chance to take a shy at money and fame.”

Some say the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is also to blame here. Yielding to the BCCI’s arm-twisting in January, the International Cricket Council acquitted Harbhajan of charges of racial abuse brought against him by the Australian board over the Symonds issue, and lifted a three-Test ban imposed on him earlier.

“When aggression is coupled with the false belief that you can get away with murder because your board is the richest in the world and will come to your rescue whatever you do, it breeds complacency,” warns a cricket historian and commentator. “The words fair play then disappear from your dictionary.”

Former Team India selector Sambaran Banerjee points to the one episode that opened the floodgates of daring — Sourav Ganguly throwing tradition to the wind to do his topless jig at the Lord’s. (Of course, it is often conveniently forgotten that English cricketer Andrew Flintoff did just this at Wankhede stadium in Mumbai in 2002 after England tied a one-day series with India and that Ganguly’s antics were a retaliation for the earlier incident) “It was a rebellious symbol, but it is that raring-to-go spirit that has gone wrong in cases of increased sledging and abusing on the field,” says Banerjee.

Stringent restrictions, along with hefty penalties, may be an effective way to check the current trend, much like the sanctions handed out to other bad boys in global cricket such as Shoaib Akhtar, who was recently banned from playing cricket for five years. “The authorities will simply have to instil more discipline, and cleanse cricket in the way other sports such as tennis and boxing have managed to weed out brazenness,” says Bhimani.

But by then, the harm could already be done. “Not only will the failure to check one’s temper undermine one’s own performance, it will also set a bad example to younger aspirants,” says Nashik-based sports psychologist B.P. Bam. “In the modern context, aggression may be used to intimidate the opponent, but it should remain purely at a cosmetic level. One just can’t afford to let it become one’s second nature,” he says.

The Turbanator would do well to listen.