New champions: Zaman, Amir and Pakistan raze India for title
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New champions: Zaman, Amir and Pakistan
raze India for title
Pakistan 338 for 4 (Zaman 114,
Azhar 59, Hafeez 57*) beat India 158 (Pandya 76, Amir 3-16, Hasan 3-19)
by 180 runs
Tait: 'Players are remembered for
performances such as Amir's'
If the 2017 Champions
Trophy were to have had another two games, Pakistan might be scoring 750 and
bowling teams out for negative 12 by the end of it. Even for a side that is
routinely unpredictable, even for a team with a long history of starting slowly
then making a white-hot charge through a tournament, what Pakistan have pulled
off here is some diamond-studded, galactic-scale nonsense.
Award winners
Golden
ball: Hasan
Ali (13 wickets at 13.69)
Player
of the Tournament:Hasan
Ali
Golden
Bat: Shikhar
Dhawan (338 runs at 67.60)
They have not just
defied logic, they have spat in logic's face, questioned the moral inclinations
of its parents, kicked it in the shins, kneed it in the groin, strangled it
unconscious, then shoved it into the mud and set its trousers on fire.
Remember
how, before the match (how long ago that now seems), the cricket world thought
India's batsmen would put the match beyond Pakistan if they scored 300? Ha.
What actually happened was that newbie opener Fakhar Zaman, playing his fourth international innings, hit
114 from 106 balls in one of the highest-pressure cricket matches of the
decade, before a bristling middle order grew the total to 338 for 4, with
hitherto unsuspected power and skill.
Remember
how the cricket world thought the key period in the contest would be the middle
overs in India's innings. Idiots. In actual fact, Mohammad Amir would decapitate the India innings in a
scintillating opening burst that brought him the scalps of each of the top
three, and then by the middle of the 14th over, India would be 54 for 5, the
trophy basically handed over.
Thank
the cricket gods that Azhar Ali dropped Virat Kohli at slip in the third over,
before Kohli was caught the very next ball. Thank heavens that Pakistan's
opening stand of 128 was brought to an end by a running mix-up, whereby both
batsmen wound up on the same side of the pitch. Without such moments of
incompetence, there is no chance we could plausibly accept this is the same
side that lost their opening match to India by 124 runs.
The winning margin
here was 180 runs, just for the record. But it may as well have been 180
million, so ridiculous were Pakistan in this match.
It was also
impossible, at times, to believe that India were the side playing their fourth
major final in six years. The first mistake - the error that bust open the
flood gates - was Jasprit Bumrah overstepping in the fourth over to reprieve
Fakhar, who had edged the ball to the keeper on three. Soon, India were a mess
of uncharacteristic misfields. By the end of the innings they had delivered 13
wides and three no-balls.
And perhaps no top
order in the world could have survived Amir today, but the likes of Yuvraj
Singh and MS Dhoni - big-daddy, big-match players - fell away with surprising
meekness. Hardik Pandya swatted six sixes off spin and got himself 76 off 43
balls, giving India - six down now - a microscopic speck of hope. But then he
was run out when a less-fluent Ravindra Jadeja refused to sacrifice his wicket,
and left the field breathing fire. That about encapsulated India's day.
Not that fortune
smiled on them either: at one point, in the death overs, a ball had even hit
Mohammad Hafeez's off stump, and failed to dislodge the bail.
Beyond Amir's
spectacular opening burst - in which Rohit Sharma was trapped in front by a
seaming ball and Virat Kohli sent a thick leading edge to point - Shadab Khan
insisted on an excellent review that found Yuvraj to be plumb in front of the
stumps. Then after the rapid 80-run stand between Pandya and Jadeja, Hasan Ali
wiped out the tail, finishing with match-figures of 3 for 19 (second only to Amir's
3 for 16), and a table-topping haul of 13 wickets for the tournament. This,
after he had missed the first game. India were all out in the 31st over.
Hasan
Ali was Named Player of the tournament
But it was the
batting that had set Pakistan's victory up, and of all the surprises they have
sprung this tournament, a snowballing innings such as this, in which only one
batsman was dismissed for a score of less than 45, seems the most incredible.
This was not an innings, really. It was a fantasy.
Even after Fakhar was
reprieved by that no-ball in the fourth over, the wisps of madness that have
defined Pakistan's campaign were sprinkled right through his knock. Thick edges
and mistimed shots off bouncers would become almost reliably fruitful for him -
one particularly woeful leg-side heave in the 32nd over landing safe, just
beyond midwicket. Constantly, Fakhar got himself into awkward spots and bad
positions, and unfailingly, he would find a way to go through with the shot,
and survive.
But there were also
flashes of inspiration and the roaring ambition of Pakistan's campaign. Uncowed
by the near misses, he ran down the pitch to smite India's quicks to the leg
side. He flitted about his crease to manufacture shots against the spinners.
With no little help from Azhar, he heaped pressure on key members of the
opposition attack.
Bumrah was never
allowed to recover from the shock of that early missed wicket, going for 24 in
his first three-over spell, and 12 off the following two overs. R Ashwin was
clattered around almost clinically in his initial spell - this mostly by Azhar
- and he went for 28 from his first four overs as well. For the remainder of the
innings, both bowlers struggled with their lines and lengths - Bumrah
delivering too many hittable length deliveries, Ashwin bowling too predictably
straight.
It was after Azhar's
dismissal, for which his partner can take most of the blame, that Fakhar raised
the tempo to an extent that set Pakistan on track to their eventual score. He
hit 15 runs off one Jadeja over (the 26th of the innings), then went after
Ashwin next over as well. Having been 56 off 73 balls at one stage, he hit the
remaining 44 runs he needed for a hundred off the next 19 balls. The
off-balance sweep for four off Ashwin was a fitting way for this innings to go
to triple figures.
Fakhar was out soon
after, leaving Pakistan at 200 for 2 at the start of the 34th over, but Babar
ensured the party would carry on. He was regal square on either side of the
wicket, and in a particularly memorable sequence, slapped Pandya past point,
then cracked him to the square-leg boundary next ball. Mohammad Hafeez and Imad
Wasim then took the baton from Babar, and together, added 71 off the final 45
balls of the innings - Hafeez especially effective as he hit three sixes and
four fours in all, to wind up with an unbeaten 57 off 37 deliveries.
I mean, who even knew
Hafeez was capable of such things? Did he? Sarfraz Ahmed, in his first major
assignment as captain, played his part virtually perfectly, ceding his batting
position to men who went on to score rapidly, then managing his bowlers
astutely in the early overs.
Bhuvneshwar Kumar,
and Hardik Pandya delivered good spells, but India's remaining bowling figures
did not make for pretty reading. Bumrah, Ashwin and Jadeja all went at seven
and over or higher.
There is no shame,
though, in losing to a Pakistan side in the kind of nuclear form that if ever
harnessed, could solve the planet's energy needs for centuries. There were a
few areas that India could have brushed up, but nothing, perhaps, that might
have changed the result.