India lodge official complaint against Vineet Kulkarni

India lodge official complaint against Vineet Kulkarni: Team India has lodged a complaint against umpire Vineet Kulkarni over his wrong decisions since the beginning of their series against South Africa. The Indian cricket team has cited at least four examples as all leg-before decisions which they believe were erroneous and proved costly for them.

The complaint is based on what the team management believes to be ‘incompetent supervision”. Standing in his seventh T20I match in Dharamsala Kulkarni turned down left-arm spinner Axar Patel’s appeal for leg-before when Duminy was on five with South Africa needing 96 runs off 48 balls.

Later he signalled two leg buys and turned down another LBW appeal against Duminy off Bhuvneshwar Kumar, who later played a match-winning innings, and snatched a win from India’s jaws. Kulkarni was trolled by fans on Twitter later with some suggesting that he should have got the Man of the Match award.

Team India continued to be on a receiving end of the controversial decisions in the 1st ODI at the Green Park Stadium, when Shikhar Dhawan was adjudged out by Kulkarni when the ball clearly seemed to miss leg stump.

After the defeat in the first T20 at Dharamsala, Indian skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni had said, “We did not have quite a few decisions going our way and sometimes these can change the match. It could have been different if we could have got Duminy out early”.

The 36-year-old Kulkarni has umpired in 18 ODIs and 7 T20Is so far. It could be argued that the BCCI has only itself to blame for this mess by stubbornly refusing to use the DRS.

South Africa had earlier won the three-match T20I series 2-0 with the third game being washed out at Kolkata, and they made a winning start to the five-match ODI series by winning the first clash at Kanpur’s Green Park stadium by a narrow margin of five runs. The second ODI is scheduled to be played at Holkar Cricket Stadium in Indore on October 14.