“That Looked Horrible”: Matthew Wade Finally Opens Up On ‘Field Obstruction’ Incident With Mark Wood

It isn’t often that fans come across ‘obstructing the field’ incidents in cricket. However, in a game between Australia and England recently, wicket-keeper batter Matthew Wade seemed to have prevented Mark Wood from catching the ball. England didn’t appeal against the incident though skipper Jos Buttler stressed that he would not hesitate in appealing the next time. Wade, who turned a blind eye towards the incident, has now admitted that what he did ‘looked horrible’. “That looked horrible when I saw it after the game,” Wade told cricket.com.au‘s The Unplayable Podcast. “It was one of those things that just happened so fast.

“I think Kane Richardson said to me when I got off the ground, ‘You pushed him, basically’. I was like, ‘No, I didn’t’. And then I saw the replay and I was like, ‘Well, yeah, I did’,” he explained.

Wade further said that for the most part of that incident, he wasn’t aware of where the ball was, and even if it had hit his bat.

“(Wood bowling at) 150 (kph), decent crowd – at first I didn’t know if I hit it. It hit me in the head hard, it rung my bell a little bit, (I) went to run down the wicket, Davey (Warner) sent me back, I turned and saw point running in.

“Then I wasn’t sure if I was going to get run out or where the actual ball was. It all just happened literally like that. And then next minute, I was on the ground, looked up and the ball was like coming down. So yeah, it didn’t look great,” Wade made an honest admission.

The veteran wicket-keeper batter maintains that he hadn’t consciously attempted to prevent Wood from catching the ball. Wade even said that he would’ve walked off the field had England appealed for his dismissal.

“If I had a conscious thought of doing it, then I’d be regrettable for doing it,” he continued.

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“But at the time, there’s just so much happening and getting hit in the head with the bloke bowing 150ks at you – things go in fast forward.

“Now looking back on it, I can see like all these things happened. It was chaos out there. If they had appealed and I saw it on the replay, so be it, I would have walked off the ground, there’s not much I could do about it,” he concluded.