Watch: Unseen footage of Naveen’s reaction as crowd tease with ‘Kohli’ chants | Cricket

Cricket fans rarely forget. The good, the bad, the ugly, they remember it all. And with the advent of social media, dare they can. It has been nearly three weeks since that infamous night at the Ekana Stadium in Lucknow when Virat Kohli had entered into a spat with Naveen-ul-Haq and Gautam Gambhir, and fans still remember every bit of it. With every reference of either of the names, social media remains flooded with posts targetting the other. And on the field, the players are reminded of it again by the unforgivable crowd, but Naveen had a blockbuster reaction to it.

Since that game against RCB in Lucknow at the start of the month, Naveen did not return to action for LSG before being picked in their final home game on May 17, where they had taken on Mumbai Indians.

Naveen had made a decent start with the new ball, conceding a boundary each in his first two overs. But while it was expected of the home crowd to get behind their bowler and cheer for him in his return to the playing XI, Naveen was brutally teased with wild “Kohli” chants. Each time he geared up for the ball, the chants got louder. Two days hence the battle, a fresh footage showed Naveen’s true reaction to crowd’s act.

In the video, Naveen can be seen fielding near the boundary rope with the crowd busy in their act of teasing him. One would expect the player to get angry, lose his cool, probably throw in a death star, or maybe could completely ignore it and stay focussed on the game. But the Afghanistan quick turned around gestured at the crowd to shout louder and louder before re-focussing in the game.

Watch the video here…

Rewinding to the incident on May 1, Naveen was left fuming at Kohli who had allegedly pointed him to the dirt on his shoes. The LSG player, who was then batting, charged at him resulting in an altercation which saw the on-field umpire intervene- along with fellow Lucknow teammate Amit Mishra. Later the two had shared an intense handshake as well following which there was a spat between Kohli and LSG mentor Gambhir.

The ugly scene later stretched to social media where either side posted cryptic posts on Instagram to target each other. And although it was the last from Kohli, Naveen took it even further with his “sweet mangoes” post a few days later which fans felt was targetting Kohli given that the post also involved a screengrab of one of RCB’s matches running on TV.