Revisiting the DRS controversy that rocked the hotly contested Test series between India and Australia back in March, Australia captain Steve Smith wrote in his book The Journey that Virat Kohli’s claims were ‘rubbish’ and the Indian captain’s behaviour post the series remain a mystery to him till date.
Smith seemed to be looking at the dressing room over a DRS call during the Bengaluru Test earlier this year. He later described it as a ‘brain fade’ moment. After the DRS incident, Kohli stopped short of calling Smith a cheat and went on to say after the Dharamshala Test that the Australian players were no more his friends.
In an interview to ESPNcricinfo, Smith called the claims ‘rubbish’. He described in his book, “It wasn’t until afterwards that I realised what a talking point it had become, fuelled by Kohli’s post-match claims that we’d called on off-field assistance twice earlier in the match to help our on-field deliberations. As far as I was concerned, we’d never tried to consult with the dressing room beforehand and although he said he’d brought those previous occasions to the notice of the umpires, I can say categorically that we were never spoken to by either those umpires or match referee Chris Broad about any such breaches in protocol.”
“Virat has always been a player who’s thrived in the most intense of environments, and like me he loves a battle and I can only think it was his way of raising the temperature in the series in an attempt to get the best out of himself. The idea of getting messages from the sidelines for that purpose was not a tactic we as a team ever spoke about and … I can’t work out what he was referring to in his remarks.
“There was never anything further on the matter from the ICC and Virat never detailed the incidents he was referring to. And during the brief interactions we had – including at the captain’s briefing for the IPL as that tournament followed the series – he was friendly and it was as if any ill-feeling he may have had over the incident had disappeared. It was and still is all a big mystery to me,” wrote Smith.
