First published in June 2015

To watch Ricky Ponting and Harbhajan Singh’s blossoming bromance at the Mumbai Indians, where Ponting now coaches and Harbhajan still turns his arm over, it would be easy to forget the bile-spewing nastiness of the Noughties.

The name-calling, public denouncements and ICC disciplinary hearings from that pernicious period appeared all but forgotten by the time the pair gave each other a cathartic bear-hug while celebrating a wicket as teammates for the IPL outfit in 2013. More recently, during this year’s IPL campaign, Harbhajan was gushing in his praise of his “fantastic coach”.

It’s all a far cry from those testy, tasty rubbers of 2007/08 and 2008/09 when relations between Australia and India became as hostile as any we’ve seen in Test cricket. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t clever, and it certainly wasn’t pretty. But it was compulsive viewing. And Australia’s street-fighting skipper and India’s supreme wind-up merchant were right at the very heart of it. At one stage Ponting and Harbhajan seemingly couldn’t get through a session without squaring up or mouthing off as a feud that had been simmering for a decade reached boiling point.

It was, though, reassuring to learn ahead of the 2015 World Cup that while the pair have hugged and made up, the rivalry’s still going strong. In the lead-up to the tournament the ICC were highlighting some memorable moments and tweeted a link to Ponting’s stunning knock in the 2003 World Cup final that set up Australia’s victory over India. Harbhajan couldn’t help himself, tweeting back: “punter was lbw out at 40 odd in the icc wc 2003 final but David Shepherd [it was actually Steve Bucknor] gave him not out then he went on to score 140.” He deleted the tweet shortly afterwards, maybe reflecting it’s time to let bygones be bygones, but there’s no hiding the fact that the fire still burns strongly between two of the modern era’s most competitive and unflinching characters.