Australia, watching India’s strangulation of their neighbours, will realise that bagging the World Cup and the Champions Trophy at the same time might not be particularly easy. More pointedly, the Indian spinners won’t allow them to saunter away with another title. Watching New Zealand being cut down to size while chasing a target of 249, a few demons would have already cropped up in Aussie minds.
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With Dubai filled to the brim with vocal Indian fans, India showed their might as a terrific white-ball unit which, after missing out on winning the World Cup, has gone on to reinvent itself as an even more formidable outfit that could be hard to overcome in any conditions.
Indian players celebrate after winning the ICC Champions Trophy cricket match over New Zealand, in Dubai, UAE. (AP)The win was as good as any near-perfect outing that they had during the memorable run to the World Cup final on home soil in 2023. More importantly, having succumbed on a similar slow pitch in the World Cup final and later to Sri Lanka in Colombo, the win against New Zealand will give India enough confidence that with good depth in batting and bowling, they can now overcome such conditions — with spinners as the enforcers.
Having brushed aside Bangladesh, Pakistan and now New Zealand — on the most challenging of pitches they have faced so far in this Champions Trophy — India will now resume the much-revered rivalry against Australia in the semi-final. Although Rohit Sharma & Co kicked them out of the T20 World Cup last year, this knockout outing against Australia provides a perfect setting to avenge November 19, 2023, in Ahmedabad.
Though the conditions in Dubai will remind Australia of the ones they aced in the World Cup final, it will be India which will take the field as firm favourites on the back of having a spin attack that is looking hard to score off with each passing match. Varun was near-unplayable on Sunday. That New Zealand, who were posting totals in excess of 300 during their stay in Pakistan, managed to just surpass 200 this time, points to the task that the world champions have ahead of them.
“Very important for us to finish on a high,” skipper Rohit said about the win. “It is going to be a good game. Australia have a rich history of playing well in ICC tournaments. It will be a great contest, looking forward to that. We have to be focused on what we need to do on that day. Looking forward to that, hopefully we can stitch one towards us,” he said.
Never mind that this was a dead rubber, it was the game India had wished for ahead of the semi-finals. On a day when India took the field with just one front-line pacer in Mohammed Shami with Harshit Rana making way for Varun, their well-thought out spin strategy was backed by a fool-proof performance under lights.
Indian players celebrate after winning the ICC Champions Trophy cricket match over New Zealand, in Dubai, UAE. (PTI)To put matters in context, in the afternoon, which is considered the most challenging time to face spinners, India’s batsmen had gone at over 5 runs per over against the Kiwi tweakers.
So it wasn’t as if the conditions were tailor-made for them. With the pitch being slow, they had to be patient and the four — Varun, Axar Patel, Kuldeep Yadav and Ravindra Jadeja — did precisely that. On this pitch, more than the wickets, it is the dot balls that build pressure. So in the 38.3 overs they bowled between them, the Indian spinners sent down 128 dot balls (21.2 overs) mainly in the middle overs, which brought wickets at regular intervals.
From the moment India picked as many as five spinners in the squad for the slow conditions in Dubai, there was plenty of speculation about whether they are carrying one too many. On Sunday, the surface gave enough validation for their selection, and the eleventh-hour decision to include Varun – a spinner with minimum experience in the 50-over format – could, after all, make a huge difference.
Having made his ODI debut against England, Varun warmed the bench in the first two matches as India started with their three left-arm spinners. On pitches where they have had to be patient, in search of wickets in the middle overs, how long could they keep Varun on the bench was a question that was getting louder. So instead of throwing him at the deep end in the semi-finals, India played him here, and it proved to be a masterstroke.
After losing their top three in the first Powerplay, India made a strong comeback through Shreyas Iyer and Axar Patel. In their preparations, they have gone about in search of controlled aggression, and they put that to good use here. Apart from treating the left-arm spin of Mitchell Santner with respect, India went after Michael Bracewell and Rachin Ravindra in search of quick runs. If not for Matt Henry’s five wickets and an electric fielding performance from New Zealand, India’s total would have been much more than 249 for nine.
