Junior cricket tournaments are not supposed to incite controversy. They’re meant to be competitive, yes, but they're also where players should be nurturing the sportsman spirit, right?
Well, someone forgot to send that memo to West Indies, who were playing Zimbabwe in the ongoing U19 Cricket World Cup in Bangladesh. In their last pool match with a spot in the quarter-finals at stake, Zimbabwe needed three runs to win in the last over with a wicket in hand.
West Indies pacer Keemo Paul trooped in to bowl the first ball of the last over, noticed the Zimbabwean non-striker Richard Ngarava out of his crease and promptly whipped the bails off.
The umpires had a lengthy discussion and after asking the West Indian captain whether they wanted to go through with the appeal, ruled the batsman out. West Indies won the match and booked their spot in the quarter-finals while Zimbabwe could hardly believe what had happened to them (video above).
Predictably, this dismissal (called “Mankading” after the Indian all-rounder great Vinoo Mankad, who became renowned for effecting it) caused plenty of controversy. Mankading has a long and contentious history in cricket and is a subject which often inflames passions.
The first instance of Mankading happened in 1947 when Mankad ran Australian batsman Bill Brown out in a Test match in Sydney in 1947. This was the second time he had ran him out in this way in the tour, having done so previously in a tour match after warning him once.
Since then, Mankading has only happened thrice in Test cricket. However it continues to be used in the limited-overs format. The most recent incident was Sri Lankan spinner Sachithra Senanayake dismissing Jos Butter in this fashion in 2014.
Indian left-arm spinner Murali Kartik also came in for criticism when he dismissed Somerset’s Alex Barrow this way while playing for Surrey in a first-class match. Similar to the West Indies-Zimbabwe U19 game, the umpire asked the Surrey captain Gareth Batty if he wanted to call the batsman back. Batty refused.
India was also at the centre of another Mankading controversy as recently as in 2012, during the Commonwealth Bank series in Australia against Sri Lanka. Ravichandran Ashwin had Sri Lankan batsman Lahiru Thirimanne out for backing up too far. However, after the umpires asked Indian skipper Virender Sehwag (captaining in place of MS Dhoni) if he was willing to go through with the appeal, Sehwag decided to withdraw it.
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