Sledging is a part and parcel of the sport. The line,
however, is so fine that sometimes things go overboard. Interim Bangladesh
boss,Courtney Walsh, meanwhile, believes that it is better to do the talking
with the ball rather than the mouth.
He used his time as a bowler as an example to convey his
point, stating that the batsmen used to find themselves injured after a session
with the bowlers.
"You know that my home ground of Sabina Park, Kingston,
Jamaica, is surrounded by hospitals, 10 probably 15 hospitals, and on weekends
they would be full of players we'd send there... a nose broken, a finger
chipped, a bleeding mouth... we played hard, that's what we did at Sabina Park,
that's why so many hospitals,” Walsh was quoted as saying on The Daily Star.
“Once we had the Leeward Islands team led by Viv Richards
for a game, before lunch five or six of them were down at the hospitals.”
He then suggested that since the bowlers can injure the
batsmen, there is no point in waging a verbal war.
“Why insult with abuse when you can injure with a ball?”
Walsh revealed.
Manoj Prabhakar knows first-hand what the West Indian legend
means here as he smashed the Indian cricketer’s nose with a bouncer. When asked
about how many players’ blood he spilled, he said, "a few fellows, not too
many.”
He then stressed that whenever such incidents happened, it wasn’t
intentional: "Nothing intentional about that aggression, it was just part
of the job.”