Who 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 who have just begun a 45-day tour of Zimbabwe.

Some of the players have made millions from the game but their daily allowance on this tour is 32 dollars (approx 2,000 Zimbabwean dollars). Laundering one set of clothes will cost about one-sixth of that allowance, leaving very little for food and other expenses.

When the Zimbabwean team toured India last winter, the Indian Cricket Board provided for free laundry of six clothes a day for them.

Now the Indian cricketers, who have yet to receive any payment from their Board on this tour, want the Zimbabweans to reciprocate.

The tour management has now sent a letter to Board President AC Muthiah requesting him to take up the matter with the Zimbabwe Cricket Union.

After all, the team wants to turn out smartly. The ball is now in the Board's court.

The popular team is flooded with invitations to dinners, felicitations and shop openings from the local Indians in Zimbabwe. That distracts from their basic mission of preparing for the series but they wouldn't want to disappoint the local fans.

So, in a compromise of sorts, the team has decided to selectively accept such invitations without the players turning up en masse.

"We have made a decision before we embarked on this tour," said vice- captain Rahul Dravid. "The visit to these functions is optional and not everyone has to turn up and show his face. It is important for us to satisfy the desire of a billion back home rather than cater to the desire of a hundred on an overseas tour," he said.

"We understand their feelings but we have the job of winning in front of us and we want to be well-prepared for every match," Dravid said.

Sure enough, there was a function by the Indian community here on Monday evening and very few from the team attended it. Coach John Wright, captain Sourav Ganguly and Sachin Tendulkar were among those who preferred to stay in their hotel rooms and mentally prepare for the next day's play.

Despite a big hundred earlier in the day and niggling pain in his right thigh muscle, Dravid did make it to the function to cheer up the expatriates who had come in from as far as Harare and other parts of Zimbabwe.

"You would notice it on this tour - we will keep (attending) such functions to the minimum," Dravid said.

After all, the team has the job of reversing the trend of not winning a series abroad in the last 15 years. In its seven decades of Test cricket history, India has won only five series abroad - two rubbers in England, one each in West Indies, New Zealand and Sri Lanka. It has yet to win a series in South Africa, Australia and Pakistan.

Zimbabwe presents an excellent opportunity to reverse the current trend and there is little doubt the team wants to do it badly.

The Indian Cricket Board, it seems, is finding it difficult to keep pace with the new-found professionalism of its cricketers and the present squad must be the cleanest to have left the Indian shores in the last decade - if not on laundry then at least on the match-fixing account.

Board secretary Jaywant Lele visited Zimbabwe earlier this month to inspect facilities, wickets and thrash out small details with ZCU.

If he, or the Board he was representing, had taken care to discuss it with the cricketers before finalising things, Lele would have heard a resounding no on the hosts' plan to have 105 overs a day for the two first-class games preceding the first Test.

This was an experiment which the South Africans had carried out against the Indians during the tour of 1997 and it had been roundly disapproved.

The Indian cricketers were again unhappy at the extra hour they were made 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.

© PTI