The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has rubbished reports claiming Indian captain Virat Kohli got into banter with his Australian counterpart Tim Paine during the second Test in Perth.
In a statement released on Tuesday, the BCCI said, “There are reports doing the rounds in the media and across social media platforms claiming India Captain Virat Kohli got involved in a banter with Australia Captain Tim Paine during the 2nd Test at Perth.”
“It is ‘assumed’ that Kohli said, ‘I am the best player in the world and you are just a stand-in captain’. These claims were based on hearsay and the BCCI would like to bring into notice that no such words were spoken on the field by the Indian captain.
“The BCCI got a clarification from the team management about the incident and would like to classify the reports as baseless”, the statement added.
The news.com.au earlier reported that after Kohli’s ‘I am the best player in the world’ jibe at Paine, the Australian captain responded saying, “Yeah, I’m no good. We can’t all be The King. You’re the one who lost it yesterday, why are you trying to be cool today. Keep your cool, Virat.”
With the banter reported by the Australian media on the last two days of the match, Kohli faced questions on the issue but he said no one crossed the line.
“As long as there is no swearing on the field, and there’s no personal attacks, the line doesn’t get crossed. That’s it!. But look, in competitive spirit it stays on the field. I am not going to go into details but to be honest it’s not of importance for me to speak on and it’s something that’s done,” Kohli said after India lost the second Test by 146 runs.
Paine also insisted that things never went out of hand.
“It was a highly competitive Test match from both teams. There’s a lot on the line and both teams desperately want to win and sometimes that stuff happens”, Paine said during the post-match press conference.
“It was just two competitive cricketers trying to do their best to win the game,” he added.
