Weeks after Kyle Jamieson refused to bowl to Virat Kohli with the Dukes ball in the Royal Challengers Bangalore nets, the Kiwi speedster dismissed the Indian skipper during the World Test Championship final.
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Jamieson, who had a spectacular start to his Test career, was picked up by RCB for a mammoth price of INR 15 crore ahead of the 2021 edition of the IPL.
During an interaction with The Grade Cricketer last month, RCB player Daniel Christian narrated a funny incident from a nets session, where Jamieson turned down his captain Kohli’s request to bowl to him with the Dukes ball, after the latter realized the bowler was carrying a couple of Dukes to train with them ahead of the WTC final.
“I have actually got a couple of Dukes balls in my bag. I’ll keep them up my sleeve if the guys start to thump me around”, Jamieson said in the podcast.
Christian then went on to state an interaction with the two. “It was pretty cagey from Virat actually in the first week we were here,” Christian said. “The three of us were sort of sitting down in the nets and these two [Jamieson and Kohli] were talking about Test cricket. Kohli asks Jamie if he has bowled much with the Dukes ball and Jamieson says, ‘I have a couple of ’em here and I’ll have a bowl here leading up to it’. And Virat says, ‘Oh, if you want to bowl at me in the nets, I’m more than happy to face.’ Jamie is like, ‘no chance I’m gonna bowl at you in the nets!’”
The video was later pulled down after RCB informed Christian that he had breached his contract with the team.
However, the incident had been reported widely in the media before the video had been taken out, and the hilarious coincidence after Jamieson dismissed Kohli during the WTC final has not gone unnoticed.
Kohli, who batted with great restraint on Day 2 of the game, was trapped in front by Jamieson after a delivery angled in sharply off a good length to beat the batsman’s inside edge. The Indian has now gone over 575 days without an international hundred — and maybe the lack of practice in the nets against Jamieson with the Dukes had a role to play in it!
