MUMBAI: Reviews of India head coach Gautam Gambhir‘s public spat with The Oval’s curator Lee Fortis through the Indian staff’s follow session on the venue on Tuesday, forward of the fifth Take a look at invoked a sense of ‘deja-vu’ in former BCCI & Mumbai umpire Marcus Couto.Go Past The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!Greater than 11 years again, on March 1, 2014 to be exact, Couto witnessed a equally fiery verbal battle between Gambhir, then the Delhi captain (he was dropped from the Indian staff at the moment and bidding to make a comeback) and the pitch curator on the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium in Delhi, earlier than a Vijay Hazare Trophy (for one-dayers) concerning the wicket for the match.
Rigidity had been brewing between Gambhir and Kotla curator Venkat Sundaram that season, with Gambhir clearly sad concerning the pitch preparation at Kotla and preferring to play Delhi’s matches on the Roshanara Membership as a substitute. Sundaram had even accused Gambhir of abusing him through the Ranji Trophy, one thing which the feisty left-hander vehemently denied.“It was a Vijay Hazare Trophy match between Delhi and Punjab, in Delhi. It was my farewell recreation as a BCCI umpire, earlier than we had been recalled years later after the retirement age. We, the match officers, had gone to the Kotla for a pre-match assembly with the captains, Gambhir (Delhi) and Harbhajan Singh (Punjab), after which all of a sudden we noticed Gambhir and the Delhi curator (not Sundaram) concerned in a heated argument, following which Gambhir actually chased him out of the bottom! Gambhir simply wasn’t pleased with the pitch that the curator had ready. To inform you the reality, the pitch was very unhealthy, because the ball barely rose above ankle peak within the match. Later, that maali (groundsman) instructed me that Gambhir was very aggressive with the curators,” recalled Couto whereas speaking to TOI on Wednesday. “I used to be reminded of that incident once I noticed studies of Gambhir concerned in an analogous spat with The Oval curator yesterday,” he added.
Apparently, whereas Couto was umpiring in his closing BCCI match, it was a Record A debut for the opposite on-field umpire, Jiwanjot Singh. For the file, Punjab bowled out Delhi for 228 and gained that match by 4 wickets, with star bat Yuvraj Singh scoring an unbeaten 95-ball 96.This isn’t the primary time {that a} visiting staff captain or coach has clashed with a curator earlier than a world recreation. An identical conflict, concerning the curator instructing the opposition gamers to not come too close to the match pitch had occurred between Sri lankan captain Kumar Sangakkara and the then Wankhede curator, former India opener Sudhir Naik simply earlier than the historic 2011 World Cup closing between India and Sri Lanka on the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. Years later, Naik recalled that tiff with the Lankan skipper whereas speaking to this correspondent, “Will you inform Sachin (Tendulkar) to not come close to the pitch?’ Sangakkara instructed me. ‘Don’t fear. Sachin won’t ever come so close to the pitch on match-eve,’ I replied.”
Oval Pitch curator was ‘problematic’ for the Indian girls’s staff too
In the meantime, India’s batting coach Sitanshu Kotak wasn’t off the mark when he stated that “everybody is aware of that The Oval curator isn’t the best man round.” It appears that evidently Lee Fortis wasn’t extremely popular with the Indian girls’s staff which toured England and performed a T20I match at The Oval on July 4.“Like within the case of the Indian males’s staff, he was very impolite to the Indian girls’s staff. He didn’t let the staff follow peacefully on each the follow day and match day. It was tough to conduct our bowling and fielding periods with him round. Finally, the matter needed to be escalated to the involved authorities,” a supply within the Indian girls’s staff instructed TOI.