Sreesanth's slapgate rant on Twitter: Was it just a matter of time?

It must be hard being Sreesanth. Here you are on your comeback from a serious toe injury – one that kept you out of cricket for almost a year – and yet all people seem to bring up are incidents like “Slapgate”. It is enough to send you on a rant. Oh, wait. That’s already happened . For all of Sreesanth’s mercurial talents, the Kerala fast bowler has more often than not made news for the wrong reasons. If it wasn’t being slapped by Harbhajan Singh in the first season of the IPL – something Sreesanth now denies actually happened – it is giving Andre Nel a dancing lesson or bowling a deliberate beamer against England. His antics that late summer in England in 2007 led Nasser Hussein, on commentary for Sky, to consider that Sreesanth might be mentally ill. Sadly, today’s Twitter rant does little to dispel that notion. Slapgate was five years ago. Sreesanth is now 30-years-old. The two paragraphs in the Times of India focused more on Harbhajan than Sreesanth, pointing out the former was banned from the tournament because of the incident. Yet somehow it still managed to get under Sreesanth’s skin and send him straight to Twitter, where he allowed his emotions to come tumbling out, much like a river cascading over a cliff. [caption id=“attachment_697094” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] A meltdown waiting to happen? Reuters[/caption] Sreesanth has never been shy of hyperbole either. Asked if India could beat South Africa in South Africa before the 2010 series, he said: “I believe we can fly”. In his comeback first-class game against Mumbai earlier this year, he told reporters he got Sachin Tendulkar “out in his mind”. Through all this the results on the field have been inconsistent at best. There have been irresistable spells – the 5 for 40 against South Africa at the Wanderers comes to mind – but these have been all too fleeting. All of which suggests someone who has not been able to handle the fame that he has received, nor, correspondingly, the fading of the limelight when he has not performed. The rock band and the dancing also suggest a desire to attract attention and be praised for something, anything. Sreesanth’s immaturity was on the big stage from the start and it appears there was no one to help him grow up. Even Mahendra Singh Dhoni was moved to say Sreesanth will be Sreesanth. In an interview with Malyalam Manorama in 2007, Sreesanth’s mother mentioned an operation he had when he was six months old. The doctor said Sreesanth would be lucky to survive. Thereafter he became the family’s blue-eyed boy, always given special attention and if he made a mistake, his mother would tell him not to worry. She bought him books on positive thinking and talked about how he never found fault with anyone around him or complained. He was, it seems, a saintly child, one who loved butter (a possible allusion to Lord Krishna). And he always achieved his goals. It all added up to a son Savithri Devi said she was lucky to have. Unfortunately, it appears Sreesanth has never grown up from the son who was used to his mother’s attention and constant admiration. So much so that he never developed the thick skin a person in the public eye requires. Today’s Twitter rant was the inevitable result. The only real surprise is what took so long.