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MUMBAI: Reports of India head coach Gautam Gambhir’s public spat with The Oval’s curator Lee Fortis during the Indian team’s practice session at the venue on Tuesday, ahead of the fifth Test invoked a feeling of ‘deja-vu’ in former BCCI & Mumbai umpire Marcus Couto.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!More than 11 years back, on March 1, 2014 to be precise, Couto witnessed a similarly fiery verbal fight between Gambhir, then the Delhi captain (he was dropped from the Indian team at that time and bidding to make a comeback) and the pitch curator at the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium in Delhi, before a Vijay Hazare Trophy (for one-dayers) about the wicket for the match.
Tension had been brewing between Gambhir and Kotla curator Venkat Sundaram that season, with Gambhir clearly unhappy about the pitch preparation at Kotla and preferring to play Delhi’s matches at the Roshanara Club instead. Sundaram had even accused Gambhir of abusing him during the Ranji Trophy, something which the feisty left-hander vehemently denied.“It was a Vijay Hazare Trophy match between Delhi and Punjab, in Delhi. It was my farewell game as a BCCI umpire, before we were recalled years later after the retirement age. We, the match officials, had gone to the Kotla for a pre-match meeting with the captains, Gambhir (Delhi) and Harbhajan Singh (Punjab), and then suddenly we saw Gambhir and the Delhi curator (not Sundaram) involved in a heated argument, following which Gambhir literally chased him out of the ground! Gambhir just wasn’t happy with the pitch that the curator had prepared. To tell you the truth, the pitch was very bad, as the ball barely rose above ankle height in the match. Later, that maali (groundsman) told me that Gambhir was very aggressive with the curators,” recalled Couto while talking to TOI on Wednesday. “I was reminded of that incident when I saw reports of Gambhir involved in a similar spat with The Oval curator yesterday,” he added.
Interestingly, while Couto was umpiring in his final BCCI match, it was a List A debut for the other on-field umpire, Jiwanjot Singh. For the record, Punjab bowled out Delhi for 228 and won that match by four wickets, with star bat Yuvraj Singh scoring an unbeaten 95-ball 96.This isn’t the first time that a visiting team captain or coach has clashed with a curator before an international game. A similar clash, about the curator instructing the opposition players to not come too near the match pitch had occurred between Sri lankan captain Kumar Sangakkara and the then Wankhede curator, former India opener Sudhir Naik just before the historic 2011 World Cup final between India and Sri Lanka at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. Years later, Naik recalled that tiff with the Lankan skipper while talking to this correspondent, “Will you tell Sachin (Tendulkar) to not come near the pitch?’ Sangakkara told me. ‘Don’t worry. Sachin will never come so near the pitch on match-eve,’ I replied.”
Oval Pitch curator was ‘problematic’ for the Indian women’s team too
Meanwhile, India’s batting coach Sitanshu Kotak wasn’t off the mark when he said that “everyone knows that The Oval curator isn’t the easiest man around.” It seems that Lee Fortis wasn’t very popular with the Indian women’s team which toured England and played a T20I match at The Oval on July 4.“Like in the case of the Indian men’s team, he was very rude to the Indian women’s team. He didn’t let the team practice peacefully on both the practice day and match day. It was difficult to conduct our bowling and fielding sessions with him around. Ultimately, the matter had to be escalated to the concerned authorities,” a source in the Indian women’s team told TOI.
Source: Times of India
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