Captaining a side is a difficult task. It is all about tacking 11 players on the field, and sometimes the situations are bound to go out of hand. Even the skipper’s can get over-optimistic, when it comes to supporting their players. During the MI vs SRH match in Hyderabad on Wednesday, the under-fire Mumbai leader Hardik Pandya took a rather questionable decision, and a funny one too.
It was during the sixth over of the match that South African Gerald Coetzee came into bowl. And he started off with a vicious full toss that went over batsman Abhishek Sharma. The ball clearly looked like a waist-high no ball, and the umpire made the call too, but Pandya wasn’t convinced about the decision.
After a bit of a chat with ex-skipper Rohit Sharma, and the bowler, Pandya went in for a review. While it was clear, that it was indeed a no ball, the new captain persisted with his decision.
Hardik Pandya Makes a Folly
The replays confirmed that the ball was over the batsman’s waist. The BCCI had recently come up with a new rule to check such no ball, by measuring the heights of all the players in the IPL. As per that, Abhishek’s waist is 1.02m, while the ball’s height was 1.44 m.
Having said that, this particular delivery by Coetzee, didn’t look like a 50-50 call, but the case of poor judgement shown by the skipper, and the bowler. As far as the match is concerned, SRH were off to a flier, as they piled up 117/2 after 8 overs only. Travis Head was the wrecker-in-chief, who, upon his return to the IPL after seven years, scored a fifty in only 18 deliveries.
