Former New Zealand batter and the most experienced cricketer in the Kiwi colours, Ross Taylor has revealed that he was slapped by one of the owners of Rajasthan Royals after an Indian Premier League game. Taylor wrote in his autobiography, Ross Taylor: Black & White, that the incident occurred after the match ended.
“Rajasthan played Kings XI Punjab in Mohali. The chase was 195, I was lbw for a duck and we didn’t get close,” Taylor was quoted from his autobiography by stuff.co.nz.
“Afterwards, the team, support staff and management were in the bar on the top floor of the hotel. Liz Hurley was there with Warnie,” he wrote.
“One of the Royals owners said to me, ‘Ross, we didn’t pay you a million dollars to get a duck’ and slapped me across the face three or four times,” Taylor revealed.
However, Taylor added that the slaps were not aggressive but he left him with the feeling that this would not have happened in many professional environments.
“He was laughing and they weren’t hard slaps but I’m not sure that it was entirely play-acting. Under the circumstances I wasn’t going to make an issue of it, but I couldn’t imagine it happening in many professional sporting environments,” the iconic Kiwi batter wrote.
The former middle-order batsman has also written about racism extensively in his book, stating that he had been in the wrong end of things many times.
“Having studied racism in the media at university as part of a sports degree, Victoria probably noticed things that many others didn’t. For instance, it used to upset her that my bad shots were often put down to “brain explosions” or “dumb cricket” whereas other players’ bad shots were “lapses in concentration” or “poor shot selection”, or excused on the basis that, “Well, that’s the way he plays,” an excerpt from his book was quoted by New Zealand Herald.
