The commentators always have a big responsibility on their shoulders as to what they should speak and what not when they are commentating on the game and the whole world is listening to them.
Anything that a commentator says on air can be taken out of context and it can cause a storm on social media these days.
The recent one which has triggered a debate is Sunil Gavaskar’s comment during the live IPL game where he said Virat Kohli only practiced against Anushka Sharma’s bowling during the lockdown.
Here are the 5 other controversial remarks of the cricket commentators which were heavily criticized by the fans –
#1 Sanjay Manjrekar on Ravindra Jadeja
This is the most infamous incident of them all because it came during the last year’s World Cup and the player who was in question proved it wrong straightaway.
Sanjay Manjrekar, who has been a known voice on Indian television whenever cricket is on, was not happy with Jadeja’s overall performance as a white ball cricketer and he decided to call him a bits and pieces cricketer during a World Cup game.
While Jadeja expressed his unhappiness about Manjrekar’s comment on social media, he then performed wonderfully well with both bat and ball in the World Cup 2019 semi-final against New Zealand and Manjrekar had to take a lot of flak after that.
#2 Sanjay Manjrekar on Kieron Pollard
Sanjay Manjrekar is so straightforward that sometimes his words offend the players a bit too much. However, this was an instance of a player completely misunderstanding Manjrekar than Manjrekar saying anything wrong.
The West Indies all-rounder Kieron Pollard thought that Manjrekar said he didn’t have enough brains to bat up the order and he just came out and slammed Manjrekar on social media, but Manjrekar actually never said something like that on air.
While he was criticized again, Manjrekar later clarified everything with Pollard.
#3 Fazeer Mohammed on West Indies players
Fazeer Mohammed, during a Test series between West Indies and Australia, was not happy with the training methods of the West Indies players and he spoke about it publicly on camera and that obviously didn’t please the West Indies players at all.
The West Indies team management, on that tour, decided that no West Indies player will give any interview to Fazeer Mohammed for the remaining portion of the tour.
#4 Nasser Hussain on Indian players
The former England captain Nasser Hussain, who is a very popular commentator these days, once called some of the Indian cricketers “donkeys” and he said that because of the slow movement of the ageing Indian cricketers across the turf.
While the England Cricket Board (ECB) didn’t take any action on Hussain for that particular comment, Hussain became very unpopular among the Indian fans for a while.
#5 Keery O’Keefe on Indian domestic circuit
This is a very recent story where a former Australian off spinner Kerry O’Keefe took a dig at the standard of the first class cricket in India by saying that Mayank Agarwal must have scored his triple hundred against a team of canteen staff.
While Kerry’s fellow Australian commentators sitting in the box shared a good laugh at that, the Indian fans didn’t enjoy it one bit and Kerry had to cope a lot of criticism on twitter.
