Keiron Pollard is well known for his antics on the field, getting into dialogue with umpires and opponents from time to time and sometimes going a bit too far in the process.
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Taping his lips up as a gesture to the umpire during the IPL and throwing the bat at Mitchell Starc are two such instances, but he seemed to have crossed the line against Evin Lewis in the CPL.
St. Kitts and Patriots needs 1 run to win and Lewis, who was batting on 97 needed a boundary to score the fastest CPL hundred ever and the second fastest overall, but Pollard overstepped by a ‘huge’ margin, robbing Lewis of his shot at glory.
Pollard was criticised heavily by the cricketing fraternity, some even labelling him as a ‘cheat’, as the no-ball didn’t seem to one that was brought about by a ‘minor’ change in stride.
But Pollard has now come out and justified his actions, saying that he had no intention of bowling a no-ball in order to not let Lewis get to the landmark, and was only trying his best to get him out.
“When I took up that ball in that last delivery, I had one thing in my mind: trying to bowl a delivery, my best delivery – what has been working for me throughout the tournament – a short delivery to see if he [will] have a waft at it, to see if it can go up in the air and we can get him out,” Pollard said in an interview with Sports Max.
“Although we would have lost the game, I was still thinking of getting him out, and using my strength, what I had been doing. Unfortunately, [the] stride went for that extra, I stepped over the mark and I think that has been the talking point, of what actually happened, the actual no-ball itself.
“It wasn’t intentional, nothing was intentional at any point in time. I acknowledge that we have lost the game but I am not going to just go there and bowl a ball just for him to hit it for six or four, for him to score hundred in that sense. That’s not my nature, and I don’t think any sportsman will just do something to that effect.” he concluded.
Pollard seems to be doing some damage control with this statement of his, as from the video footage it seems that Pollard deliberately dished out that no-ball, overstepping by a huge margin.
