Ravichandran Ashwin and Jos Buttler exchange words during the IPL 2019 encounter between Kings XI Punjab and Rajasthan Royals. (File Photo/BCCI)Since its inception back in 2008, the Indian Premier League (IPL) have always made headlines for cricketing as well as non cricketing reasons. There have been a ton of controversies in its soon to be 18-year lifespan with Harbhajan Singh slapping S Sreesanth in 2008, the many verbal altercations between Virat Kohli and other stars like Gautam Gambhir and Naveen ul Haq in 2023 as well as the incident when MS Dhoni lost his cool in a match vs Rajasthan Royals in 2018.
In this article, we’ll be focussing on a controversy that took place in 2019 between then Kings XI Punjab bowler Ravichandran Ashwin and Rajasthan’s wicketkeeper batter Jos Buttler.
In the IPL encounter in March 2019, Ashwin had mankaded Buttler which raised a lot of controversy on fair play. Chasing a target of 185, the Royals had started off well with Buttler flashing his bat superbly until Ashwin took the bails off before even delivering his ball to dismiss the batsman.
The pair had exchanged words after the incident, where Buttler was clearly out of the crease. It took the third umpire to declare an outright dismissal which changed the course of the match. KXIP went on to register a 14-run win over Rajasthan Royals, who were restricted to 170 for nine in the chase.
3 years later, the pair of Ashwin and Buttler would end their bitter feud when both played for the Rajasthan Royals when the spinner was bought by the franchise in the IPL 2022 mega auction. Rajasthan Royals CEO Jake Lush McCrum had said back then that they spoke to Buttler about their preferences.
“We spoke to Jos prior to the auction and just talked through all of our prioritisation of players. Honestly, he didn’t even think about it (his run out by Ashwin at the non-striker’s end in 2019). I had to sort of bring it up to just check it was okay. And he said ‘it’s absolutely fine’,” Jake had said.
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