JOIN USMumbai attitude silly: Uthappa
Mumbai’s outlandish behaviour was put in perspective by Karnataka skipper Robin Uthappa, who made no attempt to camouflage his disappointment at the way the opposition had conducted itself.
“In a crunch game like this, sometimes tempers do flare. But honestly, I believe we handled it better,” Uthappa said. “We didn’t go about making statements or giving reports. We understood that there would be a certain amount of banter but in all honesty, I never expected a Mumbai side who have claims of such a great ‘attitude’ to go out and report a few issues that seemed very silly. But yes, we play cricket really hard. When they gave it hard to us, we paid it back hard. That’s the way we play our cricket.”
After the much chronicled events of the previous three days, Mumbai hardly covered themselves in glory on day four. Dhawal Kulkarni veered twice from his natural course to point his right fist in the face of the batsmen after accounting for Stuart Binny and R Vinay Kumar, while several members of the team gesticulated angrily towards the Karnataka dressing room and pointed fingers and stumps in the direction of the crowd after victory had been secured, Abhishek Nayar the main culprit with repeated hip thrusts accompanied by a slew of expletives.
Wasim Jaffer, himself a composed, well behaved man, looked a little embarrassed when he spoke of behavioural outbursts. “Obviously, things got a little bit heated at times,” the Mumbai skipper conceded. “I don’t like that, I myself am a calm guy. I don’t like to show my emotions too much but not all of them are like me. They want to do well in this game, it is an important game for their careers.
“At times, you feel bad and the emotions come out. As long as it doesn’t go out of the limit, that’s okay because at the end of the day, you are competing against each other.
“But yes, at some stages it did go out of limit. I won’t point out specific instances but that’s temper showing itself. Both teams wanted to win. At important stages, they felt bad and it did get out of hand.” Not a great advertisement for the game, then, even if the final itself was an otherwise wonderful spectacle.
More fine for Agarkar
Meanwhile the match referee fined Uthappa with 50 per cent of his match fee for hurling the ball to the ground after taking a catch to dismiss Agarkar in Mumbai’s second innings. Agarkar, who was also fined 50 % of his match fee for showing dissent after his run out in the first innings, was fined further 50 % for pointing finger at umpire Sanjay Hazare after being dismissed in the second innings, while medium pacer Dhawal Kulkarni had to cop half of his match fee for swearing at Vinay after dismissing the batsman on Thursday.