‘A Rajasthan Royals owner slapped me 3-4 times’: Ross Taylor recalls a shocking incident during IPL

Former New Zealand captain Ross Taylor has revealed a shocking incident in his autobiography ‘Ross Taylor: Black & White’, which was released earlier this week.

Taylor recalled when he was slapped across the face by a Rajasthan Royals (RR) owner after he was dismissed for a duck in an Indian Premier League (IPL) match against the Punjab Kings (then Kings XI Punjab) in Mohali.

Although the Black Caps cricketer mentioned that the slaps were not hard, but said he was not sure if it was entirely play-acting.

“The chase was 195, I was lbw for a duck, and we didn’t get close. Afterwards, the team, support staff and management were in the bar on the top floor of the hotel. Liz Hurley was there with Warnie [Shane Warne],” Taylor wrote in his book, an excerpt of which was published on Stuff.co.nz.

“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. He was laughing, and they weren’t hard slaps, but I’m not sure 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,” he added.

Notably, Taylor had represented Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) during the initial years of the cash-rich league, but the Rajasthan franchise had snapped him up for $1 million in 2011. The Wellington-born cricketer, however, said that he would have preferred to stay with the Bangalore franchise rather than the 2008 IPL winners.

“While it was amazing to go for a million dollars, in the long run, I would’ve been better off if RCB had got me for US$950,000. If they had, it would have been my fourth year with them. When you fetch that sort of money, you’re desperately keen to prove that you’re worth it. I’d paid my dues at RCB: if I’d had a lean trot, the management would have had faith in me because of what I’d done in the past. When you go to a new team, you don’t get that backing. You never feel comfortable because you know that if you go two or three games without a score, you come under cold-eyed scrutiny,” Taylor wrote further.