Ind,Oz cricketers battle it out with words before 3rd Test

It got an angry response from Indian pace spearhead Zaheer Khan,who asked Haddin to focus on his own “fragile” wicketkeeping skills.

“Haddin needs to worry about his keeping. It appears really fragile to me and he needs to start moving,” he said.

Equally sharp was the reaction of Australian pacer Peter Siddle,who felt the Indian left-arm paceman had got it all wrong.

“Zaheer saying he (Haddin) has got to concentrate on his keeping,I wouldn’t like to see how good his (Zaheer) tips are on keeping. I don’t think it’s his place to say that either. Obviously Zaheer is going alright at the moment and he likes to say those things,” he told reporters.

Zaheer said Haddin’s comments were aimed at playing mind games with the tourists,who trail the Test series 0-2. The third Test of the series starts here Friday.

“He’s doing all the talking. He’s definitely playing his role.”

Haddin had stated that,”We know this side can be as fragile as any team in the world if things aren’t going their way and they can turn on each other and the media turns on them pretty quick,” he was quoted by the media here.

“We knew if we could keep them out there and put the numbers like we did on the board we knew we’d get the rewards because they break quicker than anyone in the world.”

Meanwhile,Zaheer also took a swipe at former Australian captain Ricky Ponting,saying although he scored a century in the second Test in Sydney,he didn’t look the batsman he used to be.

“All I can say is that he (Ponting) applied himself well. But the Ricky Ponting of old the flair is different now. He was more of a grinder and it wasn’t his natural game. But a hundred is a hundred and all credit to him.”

Meanwhile,a newspaper report claimed that the swashbuckling Indian opener Virender Sehwag is the man ‘polarising opinions’ in a ‘squabbling’ Indian dressing room.

Cricket writer Robert Craddock,in a write-up in Courier Mail,claims that some players in the dessing room want Sehwag to take over as captain from Mahendra Singh Dhoni after back-to-back Test defeats against Australia.

“Besieged Duncan Fletcher is facing the greatest challenge of his coaching career as he tries to restore harmony to a squabbling Indian dressing room fractured by the stresses of their capitulation to Australia,” Craddock wrote.

“Opening batsman Virender Sehwag is the man polarising opinions in the Indian rooms,” he said.

“Some team-mates feel he should be captain instead of keeper MS Dhoni while his detractors are aghast at the lack of fight he has shown in several innings – including his meek second-innings surrender in Sydney when he displayed the resilience of a soggy tissue to waft an airy cut to Dave Warner from the eighth ball he faced.”

This is not the first time that media Down Under has targetted the visitors. Earlier,’Herald Sun’ writer Malcolm Conn had written that Sachin Tendulkar lost the respect of some Australian players after he sided with his teammate Harbhajan Singh during the 2008 ‘monkeygate’ scandal.