‘Running on pitch unintentional’ – Indrajith

B Indrajith, the Tamil Nadu batsman, has come out in defence of his team following two incidents that involved their batsmen running on the danger area. In the 66th over of the day, Dinesh Karthik received a warning for running on the pitch, but the next transgression, featuring Vijay Shankar, eight overs later resulted in umpire Virender Sharma slapping a five-run penalty on Tamil Nadu.

Indrajith maintained it was unintentional, and that there was no attempt to gain any undue advantage. “We weren’t running intentionally, and even the ball where the five-run penalty was imposed he [Shankar] played the reverse sweep and he was running normally,” he said. “Even on a day-one pitch, we would run like this; just because it’s a day-four pitch we can’t run differently.

“As batsmen, we take one step forward and move away. But, it’s a crucial game, and it’s day four, we are putting pressure on them, so the umpires thought we were intentionally doing it, but we didn’t. He [Aditya Tare] was mentioning us and telling the umpires we were intentionally running on the pitch and that he wasn’t addressing it. The umpires said to him ‘you don’t have to interfere; we will take care of things.'”

Chandrakant Pandit, the …

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