Image Credit- AP
In reference to Shakib Al Hasan’s petition for a
timed-out dismissal against Angelo Mathews during their World Cup match in
Delhi on Monday, Allan Donald, the coach of Bangladesh’s fast-bowling team, has
stated that he doesn’t “like that sort of thing”. To Mathews’ dismay,
the appeal was upheld. Shakib later claimed that he took certain actions
“to make sure my team wins,” but Mathews referred to this as
“absolutely disgraceful.”
In an interview with CricBlog.Net, conducted soon
after the Bangladesh team returned to their hotel in Delhi, Donald said,
“It was disappointing to see. I can understand Shakib taking his chance.
His words were ‘I was doing everything to win’. You can sense in my voice that
I don’t like it…
“I don’t like that sort of thing. It was really
difficult to watch that unfold – one of Sri Lanka’s all-time greats walking off
the field without a ball bowled to him being given out for time. That’s where I
stand on that.
“You talk about the respect and the dignity for
each other and for the game, the spirit of the game. I just don’t want to see
things like that. That’s just me. I just don’t want to see that sort of thing
in our game where, okay, someone was sharp out there and said ‘well, you can
appeal’. I was like, ‘really – this is not going to happen, this cannot be
happening, this can’t be happening’.”
The problem for Mathews was that, though he had walked
out to bat at the fall of Sadeera Samarawickrama’s wicket within the stipulated
time, he wasn’t ready to take strike on time, since he broke the strap of his
helmet as he pulled it to put it in place. “The most sensible thing would
have been to just to say, ‘okay, no worries, mate, sort your helmet out
quickly; you have time to replace it’,” Donald said.
Donald said that when he saw the events unfolding, he
was half-thinking of running on to the field to ask Shakib to withdraw his
appeal.
“My immediate reaction when that happened – and
this is just [that] my instincts would have taken over – is I almost actually
thought of going on that field and saying, ‘enough is enough, we don’t stand
for this; we are not that kind of team who stand for this’. That was my
immediate thought.