Close call for Bengal squad

As the match began this morning at the Eden, Bengal team manager Samir Dasgupta had inadvertently spelt out Ranadeb Bose’s name as ‘Ranadeb Mondal’ in the official team list that was submitted to the match referee.

The BCCI rulebook says that if there is a factual error with the name of any of the players in the official team list for any first-class match, then the team management that submits the error-ridden players’ list can get docked full points, and the opponent team can be awarded a full six points (five points plus one for bonus).

But that can happen only provided a formal protest is lodged with the match referee over the name-blooper.

In today’s freak incident, while the Bengal team list that was submitted to match referee contained the error—‘Ranadeb Mondal’ instead of Ranadeb Bose—the anomaly escaped Uttar Pradesh management’s notice, and no one protested.

Later in the afternoon when the match was in progress, the Bengal think-tank spotted their own mistake and desperately went about trying to coax match referee Inderjit Singh Sachdeva to rectify the mistake and not bring it up officially.

It needed a lot of convincing for the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) and the Bengal management to have Sachdeva play it down.

Amazingly, the Bengal think-tank had made a similar mistake earlier in the season.

This occurred during Bengal’s match against Punjab in Siliguri, and the victim was strangely Ranadeb again, when his name was mistakenly left out of the official team list, only to be rectified later in the course of the first day’s play there.