It may not have been intentional - Sangakkara

Chinthana WASALA reporting from Dambulla

India won the third match of the Micromax Tri nation cricket tournament on Monday after recovering from a nasty defeat against New Zealand in the opener. But it was Virender Sehwag who seemed to be lost man.

Sehwag scored a brilliant knock of 99 runs, fighting hard from the beginning of the innings which at one stage, looked like the victory was sneaking towards Sri Lanka’s way.

Sehwag hit the ball straight over the long off boundary and the spectators thought it was a six, and misunderstood as Sehwag reached his 13th ODI century. But Randiv had overstepped and India, needing only one run to win, finished off their victory with the one run from the no-ball and shewag’s six did not accounted to his score.

Sehwag commented after the match, saying he thinks that Randiv bawled the no-ball deliberately and it is not the sportsmanship. Sehwag pointed out that Randiv is not a regular no-bowler and rarely bowled no-balls and raised the question that why he bowled such a big no-ball when he was 99. After the match, Sri Lanka skipper Kumar Sangakkara denied being part of anything regarding this incident. “I hope it was not deliberate,” he said. “That’s not the way I would like to play cricket. If that was intentional, and I have to find out about that, it has got no place on the field of cricket.”

He also said that Randiv was not the sort of person to bowl a deliberate no-ball. “Knowing Suraj, he is a really nice guy. I have no doubt that it was not intentional. Maybe he was trying to bowl the doosra, and maybe to get some bounce off it. But if there has been some talk about it on the field before the start of that delivery by other players, I will have to address that very very strongly in the dressing room.” “I think if a batsman scores the runs, he scores the runs, whether it is a no-ball or not. I think if he scores runs off it, it should count for the batsman. The way Viru batted, he deserved to get a hundred.”

“It may not have been intentional” - Sangakkara