In my experience, one of the first things you notice about Aussies is how nice they are. They cheerfully wish the bus driver, the operator at the super market counter and apologize to you even when you bump into them with your trolley. I guess an average Aussie uses the sorry-thank you combo at least 50 times in a day. I don’t mean to generalize, but in my experience, they are great people to be around.

And then the cricket season starts. The politeness and niceness seems to evaporate in the heat of summer. A special breed of Aussies, answering to the name ‘cricketers’ become the torch bearers of this apparently great tradition of cricket, called sledging. In fact, there are talks of issuing R rating for all future interviews featuring Mathew Hayden.

To be fair, it is not all of these cricketers, there are still the likes of Adam Gilchrist and Brett Lee who stay away from these behaviors. One only has to look at the footage of Sachin Tendulkar walking into the ground, to see the respect Aussie crowd has for overseas cricketers.

I would like to talk about one particular overseas cricketer, who has been a target of the unanimous animosity of Australian cricketers, crowd and media – Muttiah Muralidharan. Since the day, Darrel Hair called Murali for throwing in 1995, his career has been marked with controversy and more often than not, Australia has been involved.

Most recently, on the day Muralidharan clasped the wicket of Paul Collingwood to overtake Warne as the highest wicket-taker in test cricket, this is what an Australian newspaper had to say – “He doesn’t deserve it”. It doesn’t get any blunter than that, and that was the headline of the article announcing Murali’s record to fellow Aussies. This to me was the tragic climax to the decade long struggle.

Now that the race is at last over, here is hoping we take the lessons and move on.