SA vs India, 3rd Test | Kohli rejects criticism of team’s DRS outburst

India captain Virat Kohli on Friday defended his team’s verbal attack on the broadcasters after Dean Elgar’s contentious DRS reprieve, saying that people on the outside don’t understand the trigger for such an outburst.

Kohli and his teammates lost their cool during the final 45 minutes on the third day of the third Test, which they lost by seven wickets to concede the series 2-1. They spoke into the stump mic to express their frustration after rival skipper Dean Elgar got a massive reprieve due to a contentious DRS decision.

“I have no comment to make on either. We understood what happened on the field and people on the outside don’t know exact details of what goes on on the field,” he said in the post-match press conference here on Friday.

“…for me to try and justify what we did on the field and say we got carried away is all…,” he didn’t finish the sentence.

“If we had gotten charged up and picked up three wickets there, that would have been probably the moment that changed the game,” he added.

The incident happened in the 21st over when Ravichandran Ashwin flighted a delivery which dipped and then straightened to beat a lunging Elgar’s bat.

Umpire Marais Erasmus straightaway lifted his finger but Elgar appealed for DRS.

Once he saw on the big screen that he was beaten, he started trudging back only to find that the ball was going over the stumps. While it looked plumb, the reversal of decision saw Kohli kicking the ground in disgust as all kinds of chatter started.

The trajectory of the ball post impact on pads is adjudged through the Hawkeye technology which is independent of the match footage provided to the third umpire by the host broadcaster. Hawkeye is accredited by the ICC.

Kohli, who has now played 99 Tests, stressed that he did not want to make a controversy out of the moment and his team had moved on from it.

“The reality of the situation is that we did not apply enough pressure on them for longer periods of time throughout the course of this Test match and hence we lost the game,” he said.

“That one moment seems very nice and very exciting to make a controversy out of, which honestly, I am not interested in making…It was just (a) moment that passed and we moved on from it. And we just kept focussing on the game and tried to pick up wickets,” Kohli asserted.

Ashwin and white-ball skipper KL Rahul also made sarcastic comments against host broadcaster SuperSport on the DRS saga which were picked up by the stump mic.