'I hope any man would react that way'

Jane McGrath, the wife of Glenn, has revealed she thanked her husband after his infamous finger-wagging, tongue-lashing confrontation with the West Indian batsman Ramnaresh Sarwan in the Antigua Test of May 2003.

In an incident replayed hundreds of times on Australian TV, McGrath lost his cool when Sarwan responded to a crude homosexual sledge with a reference to McGrath's wife, who had recently been diagnosed with secondary cancer. The cameras captured McGrath bellowing: "If you ever f---ing mention my wife again, I will f---ing rip your f---ing throat out."

Their confrontation soured the reputation of Steve Waugh's Australian side and earned the captain a rebuke from the Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland.

But Mrs McGrath told ABC-TV's Enough Rope last night: "I said, `Thank you. Thank you for defending me and standing up for me.' And that is the way I would hope any man that loved his wife or partner or child would react.

"You know, what annoyed me about that incident more was people's reaction to it ... I was at home, the other side of the world, dealing with my secondary cancer and the treatment that went with that, and then you have to cope with the backlash of hearing the media and others say: `Who does Glenn McGrath think he is? That's not in the spirit of the game.' Nobody mentioned why he may have overreacted."

McGrath said he acted the way he did because of his wife's condition. "That was something I obviously wish didn't happen," he said. "It was just more the timing than anything else which made me react ... As soon as I heard `wife', yeah, something just snapped. And I turned around and let him [Sarwan] have it. Whereas in any other situation I would've just kept walking, no problem at all."

McGrath said he had not used his wife's cancer as an excuse at the time because he did not want to let on how much the situation was affecting him.