Harmless banter leads to recalling one of cricket’s biggest scandals

The day after India’s convincing win over Proteas in a T20 International, harmless banter between Herschelle Gibbs and Ashwin went ugly on social media.

Since the win over South Africa in the 3rd test at Johannesburg, the performances of Team India have been nothing short of spectacular.

Team India went on to dismantle South Africa in their own backyard in ODI series, winning it 5-1 and registering their first ever ODI series win on South African soil. This was followed by an easy rollover of South Africa in the first T20 international between the two nations as everyone was expecting a tougher fight.

Earlier today, Ravichandra Ashwin posted a tweet about his new nike shoes ‘REACT’ suggesting “Undoubtedly, the best running shoes I’ve stepped into, can’t wait to flaunt them.” To this South African superstar Herschelle Gibbs tried to pull Ashwin’s leg by tweeting “Hopefully you will be able to run a bit faster now ashwin ”  

It was totally harmless and an obvious joke as the whole world knows about Ashwin’s deficiencies in the fielding department which turned out to be one of the reasons of his demise from Virat Kohli’s ODI squad.

Maybe because of this reason Herschelle Gibbs may have stepped on Ashwin’s nerve and what led after this was nothing but disaster. To Gibbs cross remarks over Ashwin’s running, he tweeted “ Surely not as fast as you did mate, unfortunately I wasn’t as blessed as you were.

But I was blessed with a wonderfully ethical mind not to fix games which put food on my plate.” totally unnecessary and uncalled for, if u ask me. To this even more cross and inappropriate tweet, Herschelle Gibbs response was very cool and sportsmanship type “Can’t take a joke i see anyway moving swiftly on..”.

Seeing this Ashwin took a step back and tried to subdue the situation maybe realising that his tweet about Gibbs’s match fixing was churlish to say the least, by tweeting “I totally believed my reply was a joke too, but look how people and yourself perceived it. I am totally game for this sort of fun mate, we shall dine over this sometime.”.

All this banter between two wonderful cricketers led to an explosion on twitter, to the extent that Ashwin had to pull down his tweets about Gibbs’s fixing and ended the conversation by tweeting

“What’s sensitive to me isn’t to someone else, and what’s sensitive to you isn’t to me. I want to respect my family of fans and hence pulled the tweet down, and now entertainment over for all my haters. See you later”.

Tune in on wednesday around 9pm for India’s second T20 against South Africa and impact of this story on world cricket.

Logging out. Akshit Goyal