There was a flashpoint in Thursday night’s Titans-RCB match in Ahmedabad. Jason Holder sprinted round the square-leg rope, dived, slid, and came up holding the ball – Rajat Patidar was on his way. Or was he? Virat Kohli and the Royal Challengers dug-out thought they had seen the Kookaburra brush the turf as Holder stood up.
The on-field umpires sent the dismissal upstairs, third umpire Abhijit Bhattacharya studied several angles and, after a short pause, ruled Patidar out. RCB were 79 for 3 in the eighth over and never really recovered, posting 155 before Titans knocked them off with 25 balls to spare.
“We saw that the ball touched the ground, but I don’t know what the umpire told [the players], so it’s something within the law or whatever,” RCB seamer Bhuvneshwar Kumar told reporters. “I have no idea about that but, yeah, we wanted to have the umpire to have a closer look at that.”
The Laws – Law 33.3 if we are being precise – state that a catch is fair once the fielder has “complete control over the ball and their own movement before it touches the ground”. Bhattacharya clearly felt Holder had ticked both boxes. Kohli, arms waving at the reserve umpire on the boundary, was less convinced, and home spectators saw the disagreement play out on the giant screen.
Back in the ESPNcricinfo studio, Ian Bishop broke the incident down frame by frame. “My debate on it would be: Jason Holder, first he caught the ball, no problems with that. And then with the sliding of the hand initially, that deserved a second look,” Bishop said. “And then you talk about control of the ball but also control of the body. So when you’re looking to get yourself up having slid along the ground, are they determining that his fingers was under the ball?
“Because the back of the hand was to the sky, which means the ball was facing the grass. And so there was to me doubt there about ball and ground, because you’re not in control of your body until you stop sliding and you stand up if you’re going to do that.
“I think there was sufficient evidence in my mind for that to be [not out].”
Former India opener Abhinav Mukund took an equally firm line. “To me that’s not out because the ball should not touch the ground,” he said. “If the ball touches the ground, then it clearly is not out. And there are multiple ways to get up. You’re an extremely fit international athlete. You don’t need your hands or a ball to get up. So that’s where I stand in the whole matter. I know the law is there’s a lot of ambiguity in the law itself. But if the ball touches the ground, to me it’s not out. And what I saw, which I’m sure the TV umpire did see and a lot of our viewers also saw, [was that] the ball touched the ground.”
Those opposing views reflect an awkward grey area that surfaces every few weeks in Twenty20: what exactly counts as “complete control”? The law tries to marry physics with intent, yet still leaves room for interpretation. Many fielders instinctively use the ball-carrying hand to push themselves upright; slow-motion footage often shows leather brushing grass for a fraction of a second.
Modern broadcast technology magnifies each frame, which can work for or against the catcher. In this case, Holder was adjudged to have been in charge of both ball and body. Whether that leniency is consistent across competitions is another question, and one the MCC’s next law review may revisit.
From a match perspective the debate mattered little to the Titans, who were clinical with bat and ball. RCB, meanwhile, left the ground talking about a borderline catch rather than their own mid-innings stall – they lost 5 for 44 after a brisk start.
For the neutral, the incident is a timely reminder that cricket’s laws, however carefully drafted, rely on interpretation. As technology sharpens, so too does the need for clear, universally accepted thresholds. Until then, arguments like Thursday’s will remain part of the sport’s fabric – and, perhaps, part of its charm.
