While the Indian Premier League (IPL) has risen into cricket’s richest league and become a global sporting phenomenon, one incident from IPL 2008, the first edition, was kept under wraps for a long time. In a match between Mumbai Indians and Kings XI Punjab in 2008, MI’s Harbhajan Singh had slapped Punjab pacer S Sreesanth, in an incident that went on to be known as ‘slapgate’. Now, IPL founder and former chairman Lalit Modi has released the raw, unseen footage of the incident that took place between Harbhajan and Sreesanth.
In an interview with Australian World Cup-winning captain Michael Clarke on the Beyond23 Cricket Podcast, Lalit Modi shared the piece of footage that had originally not been shown in the worldwide telecast.
“The game was over, cameras were shut off. One of my security cameras was on. It caught the incident between Sreesanth and Bhajji (Harbhajan), and Bhajji just gives him a back-hander. Here’s the video,” said Modi, before showing the footage of the actual incident.
“I hadn’t put it out for so long. We have 18 years behind us for this,” Lalit Modi added.
Recently, Harbhajan expressed his regret about the slapgate incident with Sreesanth, stating that it is one moment from his career that he would like to remove if he had the chance.
“One thing I’d want to change in my life is that incident with Sreesanth. I want to remove that incident from my career. That is the incident I would change from my list. What transpired was wrong and I shouldn’t have done what I did. I apologised 200 times. What I felt so bad was even years after that incident, I have been apologising every opportunity or stage I get. It was a mistake,” Harbhajan said in an interaction with Ravichandran Ashwin.
“What hurt me even after many years was when I met his daughter and I was talking to her with a lot of love and she said, ‘I don’t want to talk to you. You hit my father.’ My heart was shattered and I was on the verge of tears. I was asking myself what is the impression I’ve left on her? She must be thinking of me in a poor light, right? She sees me as the guy who hit her father. I felt so bad. I still apologise to his daughter,” Harbhajan revealed.
