VIDEO | Umpire hides ball in pocket to halt game for long as players keep on searching around
Funny things happen on the field that ticks many people’s funnybones but you might not have encountered a moment when an umpire hid the ball in his pocket as the game halted for that reason. In the RCB-KXIP game, that was exactly the case as the game halted for a sufficient period of time.
Murugan Ashwin bowled the last ball of the 14th over and to which Marcus Stoinis eked out an inside edge to square leg for a single. That also brought the game to a halt as the umpire called it a Strategic Time-out and Ashwin instantly handed over the ball to the business end umpire Bruce Oxenford. Given the fact that Shamshuddin was going to be at the bowling end at that moment, Oxenford instantly gave the ball to his Indian colleague as players went for a 2.30 minutes break.
Ankit Rajpoot was asked by his skipper to bowl the 15th over but when he took the mark, he was waiting for the ball. When he asked the umpire for that, he was clueless about it and everyone was waiting for the ball to arrive. In desperation, R Ashwin started searching for it, when Bruce Oxenford came forward to ask Shamshuddin about the ball.
Then after a few seconds of searching, Shamshuddin remembered that he had kept the ball in his pocket and found it out instantly. Everyone was in chuckles and Oxenford was smiling at his colleague's forgetfulness. AB de Villiers also couldn’t control himself at a moment of sheer comedy.