India outplayed Sri Lanka in all three departments of the game throughout the long tour and became the first ever team to whitewash Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka. The visitors extended their winning run to nine straight matches against the hapless hosts. India completed a 9-0 whitewash in Sri Lanka by winning the one-off T20I in Colombo on Wednesday.
Such a dominating performance by India was the first by any touring team. However, things could have gone very differently if not for the blunder made at the very beginning of the match during the toss.
In the one-off T20I, a bit of confusion between match referee and presenter created a huge controversy. If you roll the footage of the match right to the start of the toss, you will notice that a huge blunder was made by both the match referee Andy Pycroft and toss commentator Murali Kartik.
After introducing the party, presenter Murali Karthik requested Sri Lanka captain Upul Tharanga to toss the coin and Indian captain Virat Kohli called Heads. The coin went rolling on the turf and the match referee Andy Mycroft said “Tails, India” thinking Virat had called tails and Murali Karthik went towards Virat Kohli to know his decision.
However, in a moment of total goof up, or may be, he didn’t hear it properly, Murli Kartik announced that toss was heads and asked Virat Kohli to step up and have a chat. Kohli asked Sri Lanka to bat first and you all know what happened in the match.
Interestingly enough, both the captains did not notice what had happened and went on with the toss. Tharanga had revealed that he would have opted to chase as well if he had won the toss. Hence, the outcome of the match could have been different if the blunder at the toss did not occur.
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But, thanks to social media, this mistake was identified by netizens and soon it became a hot topic of discussion among cricket fans.
Though toss doesn’t play the most important role in a format as short as T20, it still remains debatable if Sri Lanka would have fared better batting second. Chasing 171 for victory, India rode on a 119-run second-wicket stand between Kohli (82) and Manish Pandey (51 not out) to achieve their target with four balls to spare.
Virat Kohli made the night his own, with wonderful innings of 82 in the chase of 170 runs. The visitors remained unbeaten in their nine matches against Sri Lanka as they won the Test and one-day series 3-0, 5-0 and one-off T20 respectively.