London, Aug 7 (IANS) England batsman Eoin Morgan Sunday blamed umpire Asad Rauf for his teammate Ian Bell's bizarre run out during the Trent Bridge Test against India.
Morgan was at the non-striker's end when Bell left his crease thinking it to be tea. It was Morgan's clip off the leg for three but Bell thought it to be a boundary and joined his teammate to leave for pavilion. The Indians clipped the bails and appealed for a run out much to the shock of English batsmen.
It was only when the Indian skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni withdrew the appeal that the goodwill was restored between the two sides.
Morgan said Rauf, who never announces the end of an over like others, only "gestured" when he asked about the ball, convincing him that it was tea.
"I wasn't really worried until I walked off and Belly told me they'd taken the bails off," he was quoted as saying in The Daily Telegraph.
"I said 'Is it four?'. And Asad (Rauf, the umpire) nodded his head. No, he didn't nod his head. He sort of gestured. So I just turned round and walked off presuming the ball was dead," Morgan said.
"It was a weird one really because Asad at the end of the over doesn't actually call 'over'; he never does. He just gestures to the bowler," he said.
Bell and Morgan were met at the boundary's edge by Tim Robinson, the reserve umpire.
"Tim just told us to hold on," says Morgan, "because they were checking to see if it had gone for four and what action they were going to take because the bails had been taken off."
Morgan said it was a long wait at the dressing room before they were told the Indians retracted their appeal.
"In the dressing room, we didn't really know what was going on," Morgan said. "We were just waiting around to see what happened."
"The bell went and we still hadn't heard anything. Billy Bowden (the television umpire) came up to our dressing room three times during the interval to say they hadn't retracted their appeal."
"Literally two minutes before Matt (Prior) and I were about to go out, the message came through that Belly was still in."