MUMBAI, Sept 25: India’s cricket coach Greg Chappell returned from the Zimbabwe tour on Sunday saying it was unfortunate his differences with captain Saurav Ganguly were made public. “I think the media gets a lot excited at such happenings,” Chappell told reporters when he arrived here a day later than the rest of the squad due to the unavailability of air tickets.

“Differences are a fairly normal thing happening in cricket. But you can understand I am not in a position to speak about it to you at this stage.”

The coach-captain rift surfaced in Zimbabwe when Chappell asked Ganguly to consider his position as captain before the first Test because of his poor batting form.

The spat snowballed into a major controversy last week when a confidential e-mail from Chappell to officials of the BCCI was leaked to the media by unknown sources.

Chappell, 56, a former Australian captain who took over in June, reportedly said in the e-mail that Ganguly was not “physically or mentally” fit to lead the side and even threatened to quit if the captain was not changed.

“I sent a private and confidential e-mail to the president of BCCI,” said Chappell.

“It did not remain confidential though I would have preferred it to have remained so. What else can I say at this stage?”

Angry Indian cricket officials will this week investigate the growing rift that has left the national team in disarray.

Three former India captains, Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri and Srinivas Venkataraghavan, will join a high-powered panel in Mumbai on Tuesday to grill both Chappell and Ganguly on the crisis.

“Enough is enough,” an angry Ranbir Singh Mahendra, president of the BCCI, said.

“This controversy has brought a bad name to Indian cricket. We cannot allow it to go on. We will find out the truth.”

Mahendra, himself battling to retain control of a faction-ridden BCCI, will attend the inquest along with his predecessor and former ICC chief Jagmohan Dalmiya.

Indian cricket suffered a nightmarish week when the captain-coach spat was made public and the two-day annual general meeting of the BCCI ended in chaos and confusion in Kolkata without elections being held.

Mahendra, who was challenged by political heavyweight Sharad Pawar for the president’s post, abandoned the meeting amid legal wranglings and promised to hold elections on or before Nov 30.

Mahendra, a lawyer by profession and Dalmiya’s long-time protege, knows that failure to solve the crisis in the Indian team could cost him the next election.

Without naming Ganguly, India’s most successful captain with 21 Test wins, Chappell said: “Any discussion on selection from this point has to have in mind the World Cup in 2007.

“It will take time to develop a team and I suppose a decision has to be taken on which of the senior players are most likely to last and be potent enough that long.

“There are some things which are non-negotiable. Fielding and fitness are two of them.

“Guys who are buying into it are going ahead and those who are not buying into it will find themselves by the wayside,” the coach warned in the interview.

The controversy overshadowed India’s first Test series win outside the subcontinent since 1986, even though the 2-0 success over a weakened Zimbabwe provided only a limited morale boost.

A country-wide poll in the latest issue of the New Delhi-based Outlook weekly showed that 58 per cent of respondents wanted Ganguly, 32, out as captain.—AFP