Hard to move the sun, says Kane Williamson on the absurd incident in Napier

During the first ODI between New Zealand and India in Napier, the play was stopped because of excessive sunlight falling straight into the batsman’s eyes, which caught quite a lot of attention over the day. Kiwi skipper Kane Williamson, who stroked a fifty earlier, had his say on the incident.

Batting first, New Zealand stumbled quite badly after a record-breaking three-match ODI series win against Sri Lanka. Just when people were expecting a high-scoring extravaganza, a slow pitch was on offering and things panned out in a very different way. They could only post 157 runs on board, which never was going to be sufficient for the Indians.

Despite losing Rohit Sharma early, Shikhar Dhawan and Virat Kohli stitched a 91-run stand for the second wicket. After Kohli fell for 45, Rayudu and Dhawan completed the game with 13 overs to play. The southpaw remained unbeaten on 75 off 103 balls, his first fifty-plus score since the turn of the year.

‘The only option was to stop play’

Although the incident might sound pretty obscure, this has happened on a few occasions in some domestic tournaments earlier. Williamson stated the same and pointed that it was imperative for the play to stop at that point. The play was stopped just after the 11th over and halted the game for over an hour.

Eventually, the game was reduced to a 48-over affair with the target revised to 156. It barely had an impact on the Indian onslaught and comfortably they went 1-0 up in the series.

“We haven’t had to deal with too many sun strikes. We knew in some of the domestic T20 games it had been the case. It is fairly considerable and it did have to happen. It’s hard to move the sun and hard to move the grandstand. We didn’t have either of those options so we had to sit down for a bit,” said Kane Williamson.

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