Daryl Harper Bowls Some Brickbats At MS Dhoni

A bitter and in all probably a disgruntled Daryl Harper has lambasted the Indian captain MS Dhoni his behaviour during and after what turned out to be his last Test match as an international umpire.

Harper, who officiated in the first Test match of the series between India and West Indies at Jamaica, was expected to umpire in the third Test match as well. That third game was supposed to be his last game as an umpire at the international level but he decided to retire a match earlier after he was criticised by the Indian team for his supposedly inept umpiring.

However, Harper has now come out all guns blazing, trained mostly at Dhoni and the Indian team.

Dhoni, who when asked about the umpiring in the game had said that the Indian team would have been in the hotel much earlier had the right decisions been given. The comments had been surprising but what was even more surprising was that Dhoni was allowed to go scot-free – even expressed by this writer here.

When asked whether Dhoni should have been censured, Harper said, "That was my opinion, those were inappropriate comments. Any suggestion that if the correct decisions had been made, I would've been in my hotel room a lot earlier, I think that's definitely inappropriate.”

While there was the usual ‘I made only two mistakes in the game’ bit – the Indian media seemed to have got the figure of nine errors made by the umpires in that match – the biggest news came in the form of Harper criticising the Indian captain for telling him ‘We've had problems with you before, Daryl’ during the game itself. If this did happen indeed, and one can be sure that Dhoni will face some testing press in England, it does not throw much of a good light on the Indian captain.

Harper also chose to defend himself on the Praveen Kumar issue. The umpire had banned the pace bowler after he seemed to have run on the pitch too many times. The rules allow a bowler to transgress a maximum of two times before they have to be taken off on the third. Some umpires are a tad lenient in the application of the rule but Harper had decided to play by the book and had Praveen removed immediately. That seemed to have got Dhoni’s goat even more.

Harper claimed, "My comment to that [being harsh to Praveen Kumar] would be a Test match is not a warm-up for anything higher, it is the pinnacle form of the game, why should someone playing their first game be any different to someone playing their last? On top of that he had played 52 ODIs for India, so he was hardly a new boy on the block.”

Continuing his tirade against Dhoni, Harper said that the team was generally ill-mannered and after one such instance with debutant Abhinav Mukund, he chose to confront the Indian captain about the team’s behaviour. Harper claimed that Dhoni wasn’t happy with being spoken to and “didn't want to look at me, but I insisted the message had to be received before the next ball was bowled and the game continued. He reluctantly acknowledged I was on the planet and we moved on.”