Australia captain Steve Smith feels his India counterpart Virat Kohli raised issues over his side’s Decision Review System usage during the 2017 Test series when none existed. Smith said that it was all for one-upmanship during the ill-tempered Border-Gavaskar Test series held earlier this year.

In a report published by ESPNCricinfo, Smith also labelled the BCCI’s move of releasing stump microphone audio clips during the bitterly-fought series as “pretty ordinary”.

Smith also rubbished claims made by Kohli then that the Australian team had sought assistance from the dressing room while contemplating over a referral during the second Test in a highly-charged series that saw India emerge 2-1 winners.

“It wasn’t until afterwards that I realised what a talking point it had become, fuelled by Kohli’s post-match claims that we’d called on off-field assistance twice earlier in the match to help our on-field deliberations,” the report quoted Smith as saying, citing excerpts from the Australia captain’s new book, The Journey.

“As far as I was concerned, we’d never tried to consult with the dressing room beforehand and although he said he’d brought those previous occasions to the notice of the umpires, I can say categorically that we were never spoken to by either those umpires or match referee Chris Broad about any such breaches in protocol,” Smith was reported to have written in the book.

Kohli had accused the Smith-led Australian unit of systematically consulting the dressing room while calling for a review. The situation came to a head after Smith and batting partner Peter Handscomb looked in the direction of their dressing room even as the former was given out leg-before-wicket. While the umpires made Smith leave the field before he could ask for a review, the incident caused a huge uproar, that culminated with an emotional Kohli railing into Smith in the post-match press conference.

One-sided affair

“Virat has always been a player who’s thrived in the most intense of environments, and like me he loves a battle and I can only think it was his way of raising the temperature in the series in an attempt to get the best out of himself,” Smith wrote. “The idea of getting messages from the sidelines for that purpose was not a tactic we as a team ever spoke about and ... I can’t work out what he was referring to in his remarks.

“There was never anything further on the matter from the ICC and Virat never detailed the incidents he was referring to. And during the brief interactions we had – including at the captain’s briefing for the IPL as that tournament followed the series – he was friendly and it was as if any ill-feeling he may have had over the incident had disappeared. It was and still is all a big mystery to me,” Smith added.

Smith also questioned the BCCI for releasing a “one-sided” version of an exchange between Ravindra Jadeja and Matthew Wade during the decisive Test in Dharamsala.

“It was an example of the banter that took place on the field, but it gave a very one-sided view of what was happening,” Smith wrote in his book. “There would have been plenty of examples that could have been released of Indian players engaging with me and my team, such as when they were constantly in the ears of Matt Renshaw when he resumed his first innings in Pune having had to retire ill because of diarrhoea. Ian Gould asked Matthew and Ravindra to cut it out in Dharamsala and that was where it ended. So to rake it up in the way that it was benefited no-one.

“What was overlooked in the minor controversy that followed was that, under ICC guidelines, the broadcaster shouldn’t have been broadcasting audio from the stump microphones, except for instances when the ball was in play, and it certainly wasn’t when Matthew and Ravindra were having their discussions. But whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, it was a timely reminder to players of both sides that the old adage of what happens on the field, stays on the field, no longer applies.”