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Dubai: Australian skipper Ricky Ponting, whose captaincy could be under threat following the 2-0 defeat to India, has raked up the Monkeygate incident involving Harbhajan Singh and Andrew Symonds during the Sydney Test.
In his just released book Captain's Diary 2008, the extracts of which were permitted to be used in Australian Today, Ponting says that a senior Indian cricketer had phoned him and requested to drop the complaint against Harbhajan.
Harbhajan was accused of racially abusing Symonds, calling him a monkey, but the offspinner later claimed that he used a Hindi abuse, which sounded similar.
Ponting, without naming the cricketer who phoned him, writes that the "senior cricketer tried to convince him not to indulge in a legal battle by pressing for strong action against Harbhajan".
Ponting reveals that once he turned down the request, the Indian camp got busy.
"It would not look good for Indian cricket for one of their senior players to be convicted of racial abuse, and from the time their officials realised we were not going to give ground - which was probably the moment this brief conversation ended - they set out to make sure that did not happen," he wrote.
Adam Gilchrist too had claimed that the Indians had twisted the incident in their favour in his recent book True Colours.
Symonds too in his book Roy on the Rise: A Year of Living Dangerously, co-authored with Stephen Gray, questions Judge John Hansen's decision, which went in favour of Harbhajan.
He claims that he was sure of Harbhajan first calling him monkey in Mumbai last year and in Sydney three months later.
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