India skipper Virat Kohli on Tuesday (February 9) expressed his displeasure over the quality of SG balls used during the opening Test against England as they went completely soft by the 60th over with stitches coming off their seam.
WATCH - "Oye, Menon.. kya hai ye!" - Virat Kohli tells umpire about batsmen running on the pitch
Before Kohli, veteran India off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin had voiced his disappointment over the SG Test ball used in Chennai.
While Kohli and company were not pleased about the condition of the red cherry, the two on-field umpires — Nitin Menon and Anil Chaudhary — didn’t pay any attention to their request for a change of ball.
“Quality of the ball (SG-Test) was also not what we were very pleased to see as that was also the case in the past. Just the ball completely being destroyed in 60 overs is not something that you experience as a Test side and any side could be prepared for,” the Indian captain said at the post-match press conference.
Kohli’s comments came in the wake of India’s humiliating 227-run defeat in the series opener at Chepauk.
“Having said that it’s not an excuse and England played better cricket and they deserve to win,” he added.
According to a PTI report, the Meerut-based Sanspareils Greenlands (SG) had manufactured a fresh set of balls for the series with pronounced seam, darker colour and harder cork. However, it seems that the issues players were facing with the quality of SG balls, remains.
Even though Ashwin got nine wickets in the match, he called the ball “very bizarre” at the end of the fourth day’s play in Chennai.
“I have never seen an SG ball tear (get torn) through the seam like that. So it could well be combination of how hard the pitch was on the first two days, even in the second innings after the 35th-40th over, the seam was getting sort of peeled off,” he said.
“It was bizarre, I mean, I haven’t seen an SG ball like that in last so many years, but yeah, maybe it could be due to the pitch and the hardness of it through the centre which is making the ball get scuffed up.”
The off-spinner hoped to know the reasons for this in the course of the remainder of the series.
“We will have an answer for it going through the series,” said Ashwin.
(With PTI inputs)
