In the heat of an IPL match, passions can sometimes boil off and harsh words get exchanged, even between teammates. That is certainly what happened during the 2016 edition, when Chennai Super Kings were playing Rising Pune Supergiants.
Harbhajan Singh was bowling to Saurabh Tiwary during the Pune innings. Tiwary swung one towards the boundary, where Ambati Rayudu failed to stop it.
Harbhajan, less than impressed with Rayudu’s efforts to stop the ball, was not slow to make his feelings known, and gestured wildly at his teammate.
Rayudu yelled back, and the two soon squared up to each other trading insults. Harbhajan, realising that the situation was threatening to get out of control, turned peacemaker and pacified his younger colleague.
It all boiled over in the end. Rayudu was the first to apologise, insisting he should have shown more respect to the senior player.
This was not the first time Harbhajan got involved in an IPL controversy. In the augural edition, in 2008, he was banned from the rest of the tournament after slapping S. Sreesanth following a match.
The Mumbai captain at the time, Harbhajan took exception to some teasing that Sreesanth had been enjoying at his expense and slapped him. Sachin Tendulkar intervened and the pair later resolved their differences, but Harbhajan was banned anyway.
In fact, his list of misdemeanours was much longer than that. He had been thrown out of the National Cricket Academy for tearing up a menu set for him by a dietician, preferring to eat his own dishes.
Then in 2002, he got into an altercation with the Guwahati police outside his team hotel, when they refused to allow a friend of his to enter.
However, the biggest controversy involving Harbhajan was the so-called “Monkeygate” scandal, when he was accused by Australian captain Ricky Ponting of racially abusing Andrew Symonds. The racism charge was not proven, but he was fined 50% of his match fee for using abusive language.