Peter Siddle rubbishes suggestions of Kohli and Smith getting along off the field

The second Test between India and Australia at Bangalore witnessed a shocking incident when the Aussie skipper Steven Smith after being given out LBW off Ishant Sharma looked towards his dressing room to gain some sort of hints as to whether to go for the DRS or not.

It certainly did not go well with the Indian captain Virat Kohli who came charging in to express his dissent and the umpire Nigel Llong rightly intervened to stop Smith from doing so. He then did not allow Smith to go for the review and sent him back to the pavilion.

Kohli was furious after the incident and compared that to cheating on the field but Smith termed it as a ‘brain fade’ more than anything else. Cricket Australia and BCCI even asked the two skippers to sit down together and waive off any issues between the two before the third Test at Ranchi. But according to the Aussie fast bowler Peter Siddle, the move wasn’t going to be of any help.

“I’m not so sure that’s going to happen,” Siddle told Fox Sports News. “I can’t see Virat or Smithy wanting to sit down and have a chat about that. I just can’t see it happening.

“There’s a lot of passion out on the field … things go over the top and things happen.”

“I’ve loved the passion in this series and the way the boys are going out there and putting the pressure on India is great”, he added.

BCCI had withdrawn the complaint against Smith and Peter Handscomb for their conversation to seek advice from the dressing room for DRS. Handscomb though had taken the responsibility for the incident admitting that he was the one who asked Smith to look at the dressing room.

But the former Australian leg-spinner Kerry O’Keefe had different views on the incident as he said that it was a sign of Smith’s captaincy style as he welcomes opinions from his fellow players all the time and that he wasn’t cheating knowingly.

“He’s so collegiate as a captain, he takes advice from his underlings all the time in everything he does,” O’Keeffe told Fox Sports News. “I think it was an instinctive reaction, he asked Handscomb what he thought.

“Steve Smith is finding out about leadership as he plays. He’s leading from the front with the bat and in the field but he’s not yet his own man as a captain. That’s why he takes advice from so many of his players and unfortunately that was Handscomb’s message to him.

“It wasn’t about a replay, it was about the strategy of going upstairs, whether they wanted to keep a review for later on or not. It wasn’t about whether he was out. That’s they key to this whole thing.

“They (the Australian dressing room) hadn’t had time to look at the replay. This was about whether to burn a review to save a specialist batsman.”

Despite all the claims, the fact remains the same that there would always be a lot of heat whenever these two sides lock horns on a cricket field in any format. It is expected to grow even more as the 4-Tests series is leveled at one apiece currently and both teams would look to win the series with two games still to go.