Twitter reacts to Manish ‘honest’ Pandey asking teammates not to celebrate after stellar attempt

10/13/2020

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Manish Pandey is one of the finest fielders around, which sometimes ensures his position in many T20 sides. Today, in one of the stellar efforts to take the diving catch, the ball landed in front of him, which was not visible from a distance, but Pandey asked everyone not to celebrate in advance.

After enduring an usual scratchy start at the beginning, Shane Watson wanted a few lusty blows against Shahbaz Nadeem but the Jharkhand man was right on the money from the word go. He kept the tight lines to frustrate the Aussie but once he delivered a half-tracker, Watson was in no mood to let it go.

His premeditation worked to an extent as he mistimed the pull which was lofted in the direction of long-on. For anyone else stationed at that position, it would have been a terrible blow but not for Pandey, who can genuinely make any difficult chances an easier proposition. Thus he dived in front of a dipping ball and landed almost in a fine fashion.

From the naked eye, it seemed like Pandey had grabbed the delivery in some fashion and the team automatically started to celebrate. But Pandey was so honest in his approach that he signalled his teammates that it might be an issue of thin margin and he is not sure if the catch was grabbed properly.

The umpire thus went upstairs to check for the dismissal but strangely gave the soft signal as not out. Although it must have been difficult for him to see the ball from that distance, he was possibly going with Pandey’s intuition and that was validated by the TV replay. It showed that the ball just bounced before Pandey and Watson got a reprieve. However, the romance didn’t last long as Pandey eventually gobbled Watson’s catch in the bowling of T Natarajan to bring an end to a scratchy innings.