Four incidents that made Cuttack's cricket misbehaviour look tame
This weekend, the crowd watching cricket at Cuttack's Barabati Stadium realised their team was going to lose the match and decided to up the ante - by losing their dignity as well.
Having bowled India out for a dismal 92, South Africa looked set to cruise to victory without losing a single wicket.
Enter the audience, whose coping technique for disappointment was to start flinging water bottles onto the field. It got so bad the umpires had to call off play after the 11th over. Play stopped for 27 minutes, restarted - and then it happened all over again. South Africa eventually won the match; India though lost more than just a game.
The really terrible thing though is that this is neither the first nor even the worst display of fan violence in cricket. Here four matches that rival this one for shame in the world of international cricket:
Any Ashes tie between Australia and England is emotionally charged for players of both teams - but during the second day of the first test at the WACA in Perth in 1982, the emotion rubbed off onto English fans in the stands.
Spilling on to the pitch for no apparent reason other than alcohol impaired judgement, fans got into a scuffle with players including Australian fast bowler Terry Alderman - who ended up with a dislocated shoulder.
It's Eden Gardens. It's the world cup semi final. It's India.
Adrenaline and heightened emotion is par for the course - especially since India had just beaten Pakistan in the quarter final in Bangalore.
The 1,10,000 people who showed up for the semis had a predecided outcome in mind - except their team didn't oblige. India were 120/8 by the 34th over, chasing a target of 252.
It was obvious the game was lost - and all hell broke loose in the stands. The situation got so dire match referee Clive Lloyd had no option but to award the match to Sri Lanka, after serious security concerns
It's almost a no-brainer for an India-Pak match to make it to this list.
This one, in Toronto, found a player at the receiving end of taunts from a megaphone-wielding spectator. The player in question? Inzamam-ul-Haq. The issue? The spectator, an Indian supporter, had apparently called him 'Aloo'. Watch the infamous incident here:
During the 70s and 80s in England, scenes of the crowd running on to the field at the end of a match had become fairly common, to the extent that players almost accepted it as a normal occurrence.
This trend receded in the 90s, but in 2001 towards the end of a Natwest series match, Pakistan's Azhar Mahmood hit a six to put his team within two runs of a victory.
The excitable crowd couldn't contain themselves and spilled on to the field in the hundreds, causing the players to rush off field into the pavilion. Not so lucky: a steward in charge of crowd control who was left with broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder.
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