Batting first, MI could only mount 137/9 on board in their allotted 20 overs. In response, DC were 64/1 in 9 overs before Kieron Pollard was given the opportunity to bowl the next over.
In the second ball of the 10th over, Pollard stopped halfway through his follow-up without releasing the ball. The West Indies cricketer came back to warn Shikhar Dhawan, at the non-striker’s end, to not step out of his crease before the ball is released.
This marked another famous incident after Ravichandran Ashwin had warned the batsman once in IPL 2020. Ashwin, formerly a supporter of ‘Mankading’, had to bear the wrath of the cricketing fraternity when he had run-out Jos Buttler during the IPL 2019 in a similar fashion.
Referring to the CSK vs RR incident in his tweet, the former Indian pacer Venkatesh Prasad had stood in favour of the bowlers by calling ‘Mankading’ a bowler’s right. He felt that the critics were too harsh on bowlers because when the bowler oversteps, he is penalized, but if a batter uses the sly trick of getting out of his crease to steal a run before the ball is delivered, then the batsman isn’t penalized.
“The bowler overstepping by a few inches is penalized, but a batsman backing up a few yards isn’t. The bowler has every right to run out a batsman backing up so far. PERIOD. Calling it against the spirit of the game is a joke,” Prasad wrote in his tweet while tagging ICC.
The ‘Mankading’ rule says: “If the non-striker is out of his ground from the moment the ball comes into play, to the instant when the bowler would normally have been expected to release the ball, the bowler is permitted to attempt to run him out.”
Meanwhile, DC went on to win the match by six wickets.
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