Former Australian cricketer as well as the coach of Delhi Capitals in a podcast interview said that his team will not be doing mankad when he is around.
Ravi Ashwin will be making his debut for Delhi Capitals and Ricky Ponting had promised to have the hard conversation with the all-rounder.
“I’ll be having a chat with him about it, that’s the first thing I’ll do,” Ponting said on The Grade Cricketer podcast. “Obviously, he wasn’t in our squad last year, he’s one of our players that we tried to afford to bring in this year. Look, he’s a terrific bowler, and he’s done a great job in IPL for a long period of time now, but I must admit watching that last season, as soon as it happened and he did that, I actually sat our boys down and said ‘look, I know he’s done it, there’ll be others around the tournament who’ll think about doing this well, but that’s not going to be the way that we play our cricket, we won’t be doing that’.
“So that’s going to be a conversation and that’s going to be a hard conversation I will have to have with him, but I’m pretty sure he’ll take it on the chin. I think, even him, looking back now, he will probably say it was within the rules and he’s right to do it, but this is not within the spirit of the game, not in the way I want, at least with the Delhi Capitals anyway.”
Ashwin while playing for Kings XI Punjab against Rajasthan Royals made news when he dismissed Jos Buttler by mankading. While mankading is within rules, MCC said that it was against spirit of cricket.
Incidentally, Ricky Ponting is a part of MCC’s World Cricket Committee.
Ashwin is yet to react to the same and it will be interesting to see how he approaches it.
Meanwhile, IPL will be beginning in the month of September and the players are set to leave India by the end of August.
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