Rediff

Mumbai, Oct 22: Former India captain Sunil Gavaskar has again accused International Cricket Council match referees of being biased against Asian players after Zaheer Khan was fined for a code of conduct breach.

India paceman Khan was fined 80 percent of his match fee by match referee Chris Broad of England after he pleaded guilty to a level two charge following the second Test against Australia on Tuesday.

The left-arm paceman appeared to say something to opener Matthew Hayden following the batsman's dismissal before tea on Monday's fourth day.

"If he swore at him, if he abused him, he obviously deserves to get punished," Gavaskar told TV channel CNN-IBN on Wednesday.

"But let's not mince words here. Every time, it is always an Indian or a sub-continent player who gets hauled up, never the Australians.

"There were a lot of incidents in the match.

"Do you remember Virender Sehwag batting in the second innings was given not out where everybody appealed and (Australia captain) Ricky Ponting came from extra cover towards the umpire and kept on asking again?

"Now if that had been an Indian, the match referee would have taken him to task, fined him... This is where I think the ICC needs to actually get its act together."

India won the contest by 320 runs to take a 1-0 lead in the four-match series ahead of the third test starting on Oct. 29.

Gavaskar resigned as ICC cricket committee chairman in May after being asked to choose between his position with the sport's governing body and his job as a paid media pundit over concerns about a conflict of interest.

In January, he claimed white ICC match referee Mike Procter was biased against Indian players because of their skin colour, after the South African found spinner Harbhajan Singh guilty of racially abusing Andrew Symonds in the Sydney test.