Cape Town: India captain Virat Kohli defended Friday his team’s verbal attack on the broadcasters after Dean Elgar’s contentious DRS reprieve. Kohli said that people on the outside don’t understand the trigger for such an outburst. Virat Kohli and his teammates lost their cool during the final 45 minutes on the third day of the third Test. They spoke into the stump mic to express their frustration after rival skipper Elgar got a massive reprieve due to a contentious DRS decision.
“I have no comment to make on either. We understood what happened on the field and people on the outside don’t know exact details of what goes on in the field,” Kohli said in the post-match press conference here. “…For me to try and justify what we did on the field and say we got carried away is all…,” he didn’t finish the sentence.
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“If we had gotten charged up and picked up three wickets there, that would have been probably the moment that changed the game,” Kohli added.
The incident happened in the 21st over when Ravichandran Ashwin flighted a delivery which dipped and then straightened to beat a lunging Elgar’s bat. Umpire Marais Erasmus straightaway lifted his finger but Elgar appealed for DRS.
Once he saw on the big screen that he was beaten, he started trudging back only to find that the ball was going over the stumps. While it looked plumb, the reversal of decision saw Kohli kicking the ground in disgust as all kinds of chatter started.
The trajectory of the ball post impact on pads is adjudged through the ‘Hawkeye’ technology which is independent of the match footage provided to the third umpire by the host broadcaster. ‘Hawkeye’ is accredited by the ICC.
Kohli stressed that he did not want to make a controversy out of the moment and his team had moved on from it.
“The reality of the situation is that we did not apply enough pressure on them for longer periods of time throughout the course of this Test match and hence we lost the game,” Kohli informed.
Ashwin and white-ball skipper KL Rahul also made sarcastic comments against host broadcaster ‘SuperSport’ on the DRS saga which were picked up by the stump mic.