XtraTime Web Desk: Seven balls in an over been bowled while SunRisers Hyderabad faced Rajasthan Royals at Rajiv Gandhi International Cricket Stadium on Monday. It could happen in the local cricket but, a seven ball over at the highest level is very rare.
Umpire Nigel Llong did the mistake in the twelfth over of the match as Rajasthan Royals bowler Ben Laughlin bowled three deliveries to Sunrisers’ skipper Kane Willamson and other four deleveries to Shikhar Dhawan. As per the scorecard in different websites, the 12th over of the match reads 11.7 overs. The official scorers too confirmed the same on Tuesday morning.
IPL officials refused to comment on that incident. Sunrisers won the match very comfortably by nine wickets but if it was a close game then things could be very different.
“Mistakes do happen on the field. But whenever there is doubt, the umpires ask each other. Even the match officials stop the umpires and there is always a cross checking going on during a match. This is a rare mistake. Or else an injury break could also see the umpires losing the count. But these are always corrected,” a source told TOI on Tuesday.
Surprisingly, the leg-umpire Vineet Kulkarni too didn’t check Llong, which led to the blunder. “The on-field umpires’ signal to each other especially after the fourth ball is bowled. Here something went amiss. Everyone seems to have missed it. The third umpire should have intervened before the seventh ball was bowled. But he too seems to have missed it out,” said BCCI scorer/statistician P Chandra Sekhar.
“Once the ball is bowled nothing can be done about it. It has to be counted and if runs are scored or wicket falls, it has to be recorded. No matter how many balls are bowled, it is counted as an over,” he added.
Sekhar also mentioned that an even stranger incident – a one-ball over – happened in the Buchi Babu Invitational tournament involving Hyderabad and Tamil Nadu several years ago. “A Hyderabad batsman got injured off the first ball of the over and the proceedings were stopped. The player was treated and in the melee the umpire panicked and declared the over complete. When a Hyderabad batsman mentioned it, the umpire said once the over is declared it is over and asked the players to get on with the game,” he said.