Joe Root failed to hide his frustration in the field after a contentious umpiring call deprived England of a wicket for the third time in the second Test.
In this particular incident, England reviewed an lbw shout against Rohit Sharma off Moeen Ali, with the India opener seemingly hiding his bat behind his pad and kicking away a delivery from the left-arm spinner.
However, the on-field umpire decreed that Rohit was playing a shot, and with the batsman struck well outside the line of off-stump, the ‘not out’ decision was upheld.
Plenty disputed the decision, including Sunil Gavaskar speaking on air at the time. “That is no shot offered, from what little I know of batting,” said the first man to reach the milestone of 10,000 Test runs.
Ben Stokes seemingly suggested that even the batsman himself knew he’d gotten lucky. “Rohit says he’s not played a shot,” he could be heard saying as the review was in process.
Ball-tracking later showed that the delivery was projected to crash into middle stump, meaning that if Rohit had been deemed to have played a shot, he would have been sent on his way.
If that’s a shot then I’m a rockstar #INDvEND pic.twitter.com/eTfNvW6V84
— simon hughes (@theanalyst) February 14, 2021
A player is not allowed to ask for any information from the umpires before taking a review, and doing so, according to the ICC World Test Championship playing conditions, should see their request for a review denied.
Section 3.2.3 of Appendix D states: “Under no circumstances is any player permitted to query an umpire about any aspect of a decision before deciding on whether or not to request a player review.”
However, that process is not followed uniformly, with Australian umpire Paul Wilson criticised for telling Tim Paine and his side whether a shot had been played during India’s tour of Australia.
In India’s first innings, a howler from TV umpire Anil Chaudhary saw England wrongly denied the wicket of Ajinkya Rahane caught bat-pad, while Rohit was also controversially given not out after a stumping appeal. However, on this occasion the TV umpire was powerless, with the on-field official’s decision over whether a batsman has played a shot not able to be challenged on review. Nitin Menon and Virender Sharma are the on-field umpires in this game.
While the first two moments of aggravation for England were soon soothed, with each batsman getting out not long after their reprieves, Rohit, who went to stumps unbeaten on 25, may yet make it third time unlucky for Root and his team.
