Who will pay for washing the Indian cricketers’ linen

29-May-2001Who will pay for washing the Indian cricketers’ linen?An SOS on this issue has gone all the way from Mutare to Chennai.The laundry bills are a source of bother for the Indian cricketers whohave just begun a 45-day tour of Zimbabwe.Some of the players have made millions from the game but their dailyallowance on this tour is 32 dollars (approx 2,000 Zimbabweandollars). Laundering one set of clothes will cost about one-sixth ofthat allowance, leaving very little for food and other expenses.When the Zimbabwean team toured India last winter, the Indian CricketBoard provided for free laundry of six clothes a day for them.Now the Indian cricketers, who have yet to receive any payment fromtheir Board on this tour, want the Zimbabweans to reciprocate.The tour management has now sent a letter to Board President ACMuthiah requesting him to take up the matter with the Zimbabwe CricketUnion.After all, the team wants to turn out smartly. The ball is now in theBoard’s court.The popular team is flooded with invitations to dinners, felicitationsand shop openings from the local Indians in Zimbabwe. That distractsfrom their basic mission of preparing for the series but they wouldn’twant to disappoint the local fans.So, in a compromise of sorts, the team has decided to selectivelyaccept such invitations without the players turning up en masse.”We have made a decision before we embarked on this tour,” said vicecaptain Rahul Dravid. “The visit to these functions is optional andnot everyone has to turn up and show his face. It is important for usto satisfy the desire of a billion back home rather than cater to thedesire of a hundred on an overseas tour,” he said.”We understand their feelings but we have the job of winning in frontof us and we want to be well-prepared for every match,” Dravid said.Sure enough, there was a function by the Indian community here onMonday evening and very few from the team attended it. Coach JohnWright, captain Sourav Ganguly and Sachin Tendulkar were among thosewho preferred to stay in their hotel rooms and mentally prepare forthe next day’s play.Despite a big hundred earlier in the day and niggling pain in hisright thigh muscle, Dravid did make it to the function to cheer up theexpatriates who had come in from as far as Harare and other parts ofZimbabwe.”You would notice it on this tour – we will keep (attending) suchfunctions to the minimum,” Dravid said.After all, the team has the job of reversing the trend of not winninga series abroad in the last 15 years. In its seven decades of Testcricket history, India has won only five series abroad – two rubbersin England, one each in West Indies, New Zealand and Sri Lanka. It hasyet to win a series in South Africa, Australia and Pakistan.Zimbabwe presents an excellent opportunity to reverse the currenttrend and there is little doubt the team wants to do it badly.The Indian Cricket Board, it seems, is finding it difficult to keeppace with the new-found professionalism of its cricketers and thepresent squad must be the cleanest to have left the Indian shores inthe last decade – if not on laundry then at least on the match-fixingaccount.Board secretary Jaywant Lele visited Zimbabwe earlier this month toinspect facilities, wickets and thrash out small details with ZCU.If he, or the Board he was representing, had taken care to discuss itwith the cricketers before finalising things, Lele would have heard aresounding no on the hosts’ plan to have 105 overs a day for the twofirst-class games preceding the first Test.This was an experiment which the South Africans had carried outagainst the Indians during the tour of 1997 and it had been roundlydisapproved.The Indian cricketers were again unhappy at the extra hour they weremade to play against Zimbabwe A here yesterday. The odd thing is,whatever overs are short for the day will be added to the next day.