Pakistan played their best cricket in years and India the worst in recent times
For a side that barely made the cut when qualification was closing in September 2015, Pakistan, the eighth-ranked team in the world, won the Champions Trophy. While some compared Pakistan's title win here to an unknown, unranked Boris Becker winning his first Wimbledon in 1985, what stood out for them was the manner in which they decimated a bigger and better side, India at the Oval.
A 180-run win in any ICC tournament is quite huge and would conveys two things here: Pakistan played their best cricket in years and India the worst in recent times. That it happened in an India-Pakistan game, and with all the modern-day context, would turn heads across the world but Virat Kohli’s India were caught napping really.
A youngster by the name of Fakhar Zaman batted as if he were in bylanes of Karachi against club bowlers and his century on the big stage just destroyed the Indians - mentally and in the score sheet too. Yes, India didn’t have a Plan B.
For the teams, and the fans and former cricketers turned experts, it was almost a given that the two teams would turn out for the final and India will win. Barring the first five-odd overs India were only playing catch up, praying for Pakistan to do what they usually do — suicide — but their resolve on Sunday was like a team on a mission.
India had no answers. They will face a lot of questions though - did the Captain and coach issue rattle the dressing room communication? Were the Indians overconfident? Or were they ultimately not good enough to win an ICC title?
The slow fielders were exposed. The spinners were clueless on a good batting wicket, India’s bowling is incomplete short of fifth specialist bowler. And it’s basically a top three batsmen team. The defeat will rankle India. It might serve as a tonic because the World Cup will be played in similar conditions in two years time.
As former India star and World Cup winner Harbhajan Singh told Mail Today, “The result can’t be changed. We have to swallow the bitter pill and having known Virat for a long time, I can tell you he will pencil down India’s weak points and then build the future team.”
And yes, while the Indian fans were beating the retreat and leaving midway for the Oval tube station, the Pakistanis celebrated the win in typically London style: truly into the night. Talking to reporters after the match, Kohli said Fakhar Zamans cavalier approach was difficult to counter as 80 per cent of his high risk shots came off well. Zaman’s 114 led Pakistan to a commendable 338 for 4.
The Indian captain admitted that the rookie left-hander's approach did upset the rhythm of his bowlers after he got a reprieve off a Jasprit Bumrah no-ball. “When a guy like Azhar Ali, who is a conventional batsman, plays his shots, you can still have a plan. But for a guy like Zaman, it becomes really difficult to stop players like him, because I think 80 per cent of his shots were high-risk and they were all coming off.
“So you can only do so much, as I said, as a bowler and as a captain when that is happening, Kohli did sound a tad helpless trying to explain Zamans performance.”
“Sometimes, you have to sit and say, the guy is good enough on the day to tackle anything. You can only do so much. As I said, you can do little to control when people are going well like that, and we certainly tried to make them hit in areas that we felt it would be uncomfortable, but we just didnt have anything going our way in that partnership (Zaman-Azhar).”
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)