DC captain Rishabh Pant recalled his contentious no-DRS call for what would’ve been a straightforward caught-behind dismissal of Mumbai Indians’ match-winner Tim David after his team’s Indian Premier League 2022 league stage exit.
With Mumbai requiring 65 off the remaining 33 balls, David was their final potential saviour for the night. But he almost made the long walk back after his very first ball, which he nicked outside off against DC pacer Shardul Thakur to Pant, who took a clean catch and erupted in a loud appeal to the standing umpire.
Umpire Tapan Sharma, however, stood there unmoved after failing to cite the edge properly. Sharma’s not out call led to a discussion between Thakur, Pant and the close-in DC fielders before the DC skipper decided against going for the review.
Moments later, a replay confirmed through the ultra edge that David had, in fact, got a thick outside edge on Thakur’s delivery and would’ve been out had DC gone for the review. While Pant’s initial request for the umpire to budge was quite loud, he perhaps lost a sense of conviction afterwards, especially with no clear woody sound appearing in real-time action. However, the review suggested the batter was extremely lucky to survive.
That, as it turned out, proved to be a pivotal moment in the game, with David hammering a critical 34 off just 11 balls to take the match away from Delhi and lead to their first-round exit for the first time in four seasons.
Explaining why he backtracked from his initial consideration for the review, Pant said he went by the call from the rest of the players, who looked unconvinced about the edge.
“I thought there was something but everyone standing in the circle was not convinced enough. So I was asking them if we should go upstairs. In the end, I didn’t take the review,”
he told host broadcaster Star Sports.
The Delhi think-tank, however, refused to deem the reprieve handed to David as the single most important moment in the game, as they posted a less-than-ideal score of 159/7 and then overpitched the ball throughout the second half on dry Wankhede Stadium track in Mumbai.
“It’s always hard to put your finger on one single aspect of the game. I mean you can rewind the clock all the way back to the start of the game as well, when our top-order batting was so poor.
I think we were four down for 30 or 40 [50] early on. That’s not an ideal start to a T20 game either, especially a big game that we knew we had to win,”
said head coach Ricky Ponting, as quoted by ESPNcricinfo, from his press briefing.
“Obviously, Tim David played well after he was probably out first ball but there are so many aspects of the game that we’ll be disappointed with and we’ll talk briefly about some of those tonight. But the important thing is the players have got to learn from games like that,”
he added.
Ponting also talked about the chat he had with Pant immediately after the game was lost and revealed it was a discussion about the team’s on-field tactics, which he felt were not spot-on, especially in the back half of the second innings.
Those errors have led to widespread criticism of Pant, the captain. But Ponting said the young skipper is still the “right person” for the job and that he is looking forward to continue working with him next year.
