Dubai: Murali Vijay, the out-of-favour Indian Test opener and a senior member of the Chennai Super Kings team, found himself at the receiving end of often not-so-good humoured trolling for wanting to go out on a dinner date with Elysse Perry - the glamorous Australian women’s cricketer.
Speaking at a live session on Instagram, hosted by his IPL franchise last week, Vijay was caught off-guard when asked to pick two cricketers he would love to go out on dinner date.
“Ellyse Perry. I want to have dinner with her. She is so beautiful. And Shikhar Dhawan any day. He is a fun guy. Just that he will speak Hindi and I will be conversing in Tamil,” Vijay said.
Perry, who missed out her team’s emphatic win in the Women’s World Cup final against India on March 8 because of a serious hamstring injury, is not known to have reacted yet, but the netizens have started going after the cricketer ever since then.
‘‘Ellyse Perry’s husband shaking in his boots,’’ tweeted Adam Dhoni from @AdamDhoni1. Another post from @Santossskk was not so kind: ‘‘Hardik pandya toh bekar ka badnaam hai..this guy.’’ The second one, in Hindi, means Hardik Pandya earns all the bad name unneccessarily - alluding to the Indian allrounder’s misogynist remarks about his ‘conquests’ among women in a TV talk show in 2018 which led him facing a fine and ban by the Indian cricket board.
The comment of Vijay, now 36, was more casual and surely, he must have spoken for scores of Perry fans.
On a more cricketing note, Vijay mentioned how he missed his cricket during the lockdown, having spent most of his time at cricket grounds in Chennai.
Murali, who spent most of his time in the dugout last season as the team combination did not have a slot for him, added that the Chennai outfit is an extraordinary team. “CSK is a very very special team. The kind of players, who came aboard right from the first auction, you name it, they are legends of world cricket. It was a great honour for us, youngsters, to step into the dressing room and rub shoulders with some of the legends. You get to learn a lot of things by watching them and being around them,” stated the gritty batsman.
Meanwhile, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has suspended the IPL 2020 indefinitely and any decision on a possible September-October window will be taken only after COVID-19 pandemic subsides.
