Premier India off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin looked back at the contentious 'mankading' incident he was involved in during IPL 2019 alongside England batsman Jos Buttler.
Ashwin, captain of Kings XI Punjab (KXIP) at the time, was bowling and Rajasthan Royals' Buttler was at the non-striker's end in a run-chase in Jaipur that the dangerous right-hander seemed like making very easy.
Just then, in a moment that later triggered debates, Ashwin ran Buttler out for backing up too far.
While the rules and regulations laid down by the ICC deem the incident and Ashwin's actions absolutely fair, the law is yet to fit the bill as far as public sentiment regarding 'spirit of cricket' is concerned.
Hence, despite the legality of it all, Ashwin received a lot of flak on social media, where, in all fairness, there were also people who came out in his support.
On 'Cricbuzz in Conversation' with Harsha Bhogle, Ashwin touched upon the matter once again, as he was given a choice of six different houses, containing cricketers he would hypothetically spend the rest of COVID-19 lockdown with, and he chose the house containing Buttler, Tim Paine and Rishabh Pant, admitting that it would be great to have an opportunity to talk to the English batsman.
"My conversation with Jos would not be about justifying why I was right or why he was right and actually feeling aggrieved about it," Ashwin said. "But it would be centred more around how you’ve got to differentiate [between] cricket and life in general."
"Sometimes [I feel] what I did to him during that game is blown out of proportion in terms of character assassination," he added.
"Which is quite silly if truth has to be told. I haven’t earned a level one demerit point in my whole career. What I did is what the rules are supposed to be."
The 'mankading', the term which many disagree over the usage of, is a word derived out of the first incident of a bowler running out the non-striker for backing up too far. On India's historic 1947-48 tour to Australia, all-rounder Vinoo Mankad did so against Bill Brown. Since then, the law has been tweaked over the years, but remains an integral part of cricket's rules.
