As if there wasn’t enough happening during the Boxing Day Test, a pitch invasion happened in the first session of day two. Into the 11th over of the day, a fan breached the security at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) and made it all the way to the slip cordon where Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli stood.
Pitch invader puts his arm around Virat Kohli.
The Indian captain avoided the pitch invader, but the crazy fan got to Kohli, who wasn’t spooked by him. The pitch invader placed his arm around the star batter. Kohli remained calm and seemed to be talking to the individual before security arrived and tackled the pitch invader.
Why pitch invasions must be taken seriously
Most people often brush such incidents off because most pitch invaders are fans of players. But one mustn’t forget that it puts players in serious jeopardy. What if a ‘fan’ injures a player by mistake? Who’ll take the blame for it? Many don’t either know or remember it, but one of the worst pitch invasions happened all the way back in 1993; Monica Seles was stabbed by a German fan in Hamburg.
Playing a match, a crazy fan of Seles’ then-rival, Germany’s Steffi Graf, came into the court from the crowd and stabbed Seles in her shoulder. Seles couldn’t recover from the incident mentally, and it took her more than two years to return to tennis. But she was never the same. Just 19 years old at the time, she had made nine Grand Slam finals until then and won eight of them before the incident happened. After returning, she won just one slam and made just four slam finals.