At the ICC Decade awards that were announced yesterday, former Indian captain MS Dhoni was awarded the ‘ICC Spirit of Cricket’ award for calling back English batsman Ian Bell after a controversial run out in the 2011 Nottingham Test between England and India. He left behind many big names including Virat Kohli, Kane Williamson, Brendon McCullum to secure this prestigious award.
The incident happened on Day three of the second Test at Trent Bridge, Nottingham. Bell who was on 137 hit the ball towards the boundary rope, and in the assumption that the ball hit the ropes, he started chatting with the non-striker Eoin Morgan halfway down the pitch. But unfortunately for him, the ball hadn’t reached the boundary ropes and the fielder Praveen Kumar threw the ball towards Abhinav Mukund, who immediately took the bails off. As per the rules, Bell was ruled out by the on-field umpires. But over the course of tea, the India team led by captain MS Dhoni decided to retract the appeal and decided to call Ian Bell back onto the crease.
“There was a team discussion during the tea interval, Dhoni and Fletcher convened the meeting, and Dhoni led it. There was a feeling of unanimity that we should reinstate Bell because the spirit of the game was important and that getting him out in that way would contravene the spirit”, said Rahul Dravid after that match.
This decision didn’t do much damage to India. Bell after coming back to the crease just added 22 runs, before being caught at the slips. He was thankful to Dhoni and the entire Team India for calling him back.
“I put my bat down after the third run and it looked like we were just meandering off for tea. Turning around, the umpire took his jumper out and started to walk towards the bowler and it all just looked like it was going towards tea. We were both a bit shocked, we didn’t really realize what had happened until we were halfway off.
“I didn’t know until the last minute that I would be going back out again but the way it’s been handled has been fantastic and in the spirit of the game,” said Bell after the game.
This incident won the ‘ICC Spirit of Cricket’ award in 2011 and pushed behind some of the major moments that upheld the Spirit of the game in this decade, including the likes of Kohli asking the crowd to stop booing Smith in 2019, to win this prestigious award.
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