All hype & no competition: India beat Pakistan, seal Super 8s berth in style
COLOMBO: And, so, on the ninth day and after 26 matches, the World Cup's big match — world cricket's big match not for entertainment or action but purely for the toxicity this game seems to generate these days — arrived at a suitably decked up but neutral R Premadasa Stadium. The thousands who had made their way past the turnstiles had begun queueing up a good four hours before the first ball was going to be bowled.
After more than a month of boycott talk, intense back-channel lobbying and a last-minute U-turn by the government of Pakistan, both captains came out for the toss. When it finally happened shortly after 7.00 PM local time on a relatively breezy Colombo evening, world cricket finally breathed a sigh of relief after holding it in for 2026. Sweet release.
One over in, Indian fans — the thousands inside and hundreds of millions in India and elsewhere — may have forgotten the simple task of inhaling and exhaling. Abhishek Sharma, one of their biggest match-winners in this format, went back without scoring. Coming into the side after battling stomach infection for the last week, the southpaw found mid-on with a nothing shot off Salman Agha.
This track had promised plenty for spinners and it was living up to his billing two minutes into the game. This was also a significant moment for Agha & Co because this gave them a way into the contest early doors. After losing each of their last five matches in this format against India, they desperately wanted something, anything, to reverse that trend.
Alas, it was the high point of the match from their perspective. For over the next three hours, India were largely irrepressible, like attack dogs off their leash. Right from Ishan Kishan's counter for ages to their spinners' chokehold to kill the game via Hardik Pandya's wicket-maiden to open the run-chase, this was the perfect T20 match from their perspective.
This batting unit, ever since Suryakumar Yadav stepped in as skipper, have been given the license and the freedom — a word he used in the pre-match press conference — to thrill. There's freedom to be expressive, hedonistic without the consequences of failure.
You can draw a direct line between those ethos of this team management and Kishan's violent assault on the Pakistan spinners. Off his 77, 66 came off 37 against their spin, a negative match-up for him. Even though all the pre-match build-up was focussing on their spinners, Kishan made it into a non-event.
Thanks for coming, now close the door behind you and go home.
Even if some of the others struggled — Suryakumar and Tilak Varma combined for 57 off 53 as the slightly older ball was holding and gripping — Shivam Dube and Rinku Singh did enough damage in the back end to take the total to a match-winning one. Pakistan could have requested the ICC to have their greatest T20 team but even they wouldn't have managed to score 176 on this surface against India's spin troika of Axar Patel, Kuldeep Yadav and Varun Chakravarthy.
That really is why they are on course to become the first team to defend the T20 World Cup. This is a side that's so ridiculously balanced and talented the opposition needs to have all the luck in the world to even be competitive in this format.
Both the batting and bowling units are forged in fire. If the top eight are generally an unstoppable force, their primary bowlers and all-rounders are the immovable object.
How else would you explain the fact that when the opposition were 4/47 after seven overs, the skipper had to bring on Kuldeep. In other teams, the left-arm wristy would be the bowling attack's primary wicket-taker. In this team, he's a match-up bowler playing if the strip demands an extra spinner. When he finally came on in the 10th over, he bowled a ripping conventional leg-break to beat Shadab Khan's outside edge before turning one back in the next ball.
If it's not Kuldeep, you have Axar's darters, always keeping the stumps in play on surfaces where you have to keep them in play. Also throw in Chakravarthy, whose most important delivery is the googly. Nobody has taken as many wickets as him in T20Is in this cycle. That's 12 overs of all kinds of spin — right-hand, left-hand, turning in, moving away, keeping the stumps in play, couple of mysteries, carrom ball, 75 kph balls, 100 kph deliveries. Try keying in all of this to Claude and the AI system will pack up.
Teams far superior to Pakistan — it's a reality that this format's first great adaptors and disruptors are no longer a serious T20 batting unit — will struggle to give this Indian team a competitive game.
And that, now, ought to be the showpiece event's primary focus. Can any team prevent India from lifting the Cup in Ahmedabad on March 8?
Brief scores: India 175/7 in 20 ovs (Ishan 77, Suryakumar 32, Dube 27; Ayub 3/25) bt Pakistan 114 in 18 ovs (Usman 44, Shaheen 23; Pandya 2/16).