Former England captain Michael Vaughan has opined that he might have reacted in the same way to Indian coach Gautam Gambhir during the spat with The Oval curator Lee Fortis as well. The veteran was involved in a verbal spat with Fortis two days before the start of the fifth and final Test match against England.
The veteran said on Sony Sports Network, “I would have been a lot more in the Gautam Gambhir kind of mode, of pointing the finger. Ground members are very precarious about the grass. It is a game of cricket. If you are going to play 11 vs 11 running around for five days, surely someone walking quite close to the surface is not going to affect the surface. We have had problems before and Lee (Fortis) is a great groundsman and he will produce a great pitch.”
“To think that a team that is 2-1 down in the series and can’t go on the surface and have a look and if a water trolley is upsetting your outfield so badly, suggest that the outfield is not prepared that well. It has brought more drama,” he shared again.
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Former India captain Sunil Gavaskar also said that he was surprised by the spat between the Oval curator Lee Fortis and Indian coach Gautam Gambhir as well. He again said that there is an unwritten rule that the coach and the captain of any team could take a look at the playing surface before a match as well.
He said: “I think generally, like Shubman Gill said, that it has not happened for the previous four games. If at all, I think any curator has been a bit prickly, it has been at Lord’s. Lord’s is where they don’t allow you to come in. This one was a bit of a surprise – what happened and why it happened.”
“The circumstances you don’t know, but I would imagine that the coach and the captain, it is also an unwritten sort of rule that the coach and the captain can go and see the pitch, maybe not the whole squad. If the coach and the captain wanted to go and look at the pitch, I believe they should have been allowed,” Sunil Gavaskar concluded.
