The stumping that became a bowled

Rohit Sharma was looking in ominous touch, having struck three sweetly timed fours in his first seven balls. It required a very good ball to beat him in this sort of form, and Dhawal Kulkarni produced one, nipping one in from a good length to strike his front pad on the half stride. Kulkarni spun around quickly to appeal, and umpire CK Nandan shook his head even quicker, gesturing there was an inside edge. Replays showed why he might have heard two sounds, but also showed that inside edge on ball was not one of them. The ball had ricocheted off Rohit's front pad and onto his back pad, and had neither of them come in its way, it would probably have crashed into a good part of leg stump and perhaps some part of middle as well.

Nitish Rana and Jos Buttler were looking threatening, having put on 75 for the fourth wicket, and Gujarat Lions needed a wicket. Dwayne Bravo produced it, sticking his hands up instinctively in his follow-through to pluck a stinging hit from Buttler out of the air. As Buttler walked off, Bravo patted him on the back, as if to say "tough luck, mate".

Kieron Pollard replaced Buttler at the crease, and the first act of this T&T versus T&T contest was an anticlimax. Just as Bravo jumped into his delivery stride, Pollard held his hand up and walked down the pitch to sweep a stone or piece of dirt off the pitch. Bravo smiled.

Bravo ran in again, and spotted Pollard striding out of his crease. He dug a short ball into the pitch, and Pollard blocked it back to him. Having done this, Pollard stood his ground, with bat held up over his right shoulder. Bravo picked up the ball, walked up to the batsman, all 1.96m of him, and shoulder-bumped him. Pollard didn't break eye contact with Bravo, and continued glaring even as the bowler turned and walked slowly back to his mark.

Mitchell McClenaghan began the third over of the Lions innings with a rare full ball, and Suresh Raina got on the front foot to drive crisply towards cover point. The ball was coming straight at Hardik Pandya, but he was slow bending down; it shot through his legs and ran away to the boundary even as he gave a futile chase.

The next ball was short, predictably, and Raina was a touch late on the pull. Dragging the ball from outside off, he spooned it in the air off the high part of his bat. Krunal Pandya raced in from mid-on, dived forward, but the ball landed an inch or so short of him. Picking himself up, he spotted the batsmen trying to sneak a single and threw at the bowler's end. The throw missed the stumps, and replays showed Raina would have been in even if Krunal had hit.

In the 10th over of Lions' innings, Brendon McCullum missed a sweep off Harbhajan Singh, and slowly trudged off the field. The umpires weren't quite sure what had happened; McCullum had turned around and seen a bail fall off its groove, but no one quite seemed to know how that had happened. Third umpire Anil Dandekar was summoned to adjudicate, and as his voice replaced those of the TV commentators', he indicated he was checking on a possible stumping.

Having ascertained that Harbhajan hadn't bowled a front-foot no-ball, Dandekar asked for a square-on view. A slow-motion replay appeared on the screen, from a square-leg vantage. The batsman went down low to sweep, and the ball bounced over his bat, kept rising, and dipped just short of the stumps to clip the top of the off bail. "I'm satisfied," Dandekar said, "and I'm ready to make my decision."