Zaheer Khan gives epic reply to Hardik Pandya's cheeky birthday wish

Hardik Pandya can be as flamboyant with his batting as he is with his words. The latter had put the India all-rounder in trouble, along with K.L. Rahul, after their no-holds-barred misogynist chat on the talk show, Koffee with Karan, went viral for all the wrong reasons.

Pandya, who is recuperating from a back surgery, was at the receiving end once again after his cheeky birthday wish to Zaheer Khan did not go down well with several Twitter users. He posted a 10-second video of him smashing Khan's delivery to the mid-wicket region in a domestic match and added, “Happy birthday Zak ... Hope you smash it out of the park like I did here @ImZaheer”.

Twitterati slammed Pandya for being “disrespectful” towards the former India great and many called him “arrogant”.

Others asked him to imbibe some class from former South African captain Graeme Smith, who had often been called Khan's “bunny” because of the number of times he had been dismissed by the left-armer.

Khan, however, took Pandya's tweet in the right spirit and gave him a cheeky reply instead. “Hahahaha....thank you for the wishes @hardikpandya7 my batting skills can never be as good as yours but the birthday was as good as the next delivery you faced from me in this match”.

It is believed that Khan had his revenge the next ball by dismissing Pandya, but the details of the match could not be verified till the time of publishing this article.

In his 14-year-long career, Khan took 311 wickets in 92 Tests and 282 wickets in 200 ODIs. He was part of the 2011 World Cup-winning XI, too.

Pandya aggravated his acute lower-back injury, which he sustained in the Asia Cup last year, during the T20I series against South Africa. He was not picked in the India Test squad for the ongoing three-match series against the Proteas. He is also set to miss the T20I series against Bangladesh, starting on November 3.