The moment is here. Australian hegemony over World Cup has ended after a 11 year 11 month reign and which better team to do it than India. Looking at the match it seemed as if India became Australia and Australia became India. India played perhaps their first perfect game in the World Cup
The reason behind India playing the perfect match was their much improved fielding display. The combined front of Virat Kohli and Suresh Raina did well to stop atleast fifteen runs on the field. Ashwin too did some stellar work in the outfield
Australia started the quarter-final cautiously as Shane Watson and Brad Haddin took their time in adjusting to the variations of the pitch. Dhoni wasted no time as he bought Ashwin into the attack in the very first over itself. After settling in, Watson was good at picking the line and was actually looking at attacking Ashwin. But he played one attacking shot too many and was bowled looking to play a sweep across the line
At his dismissal came Ponting and he was expected to fail one more time to add to his list of failures. Ponting went on to play what can be called as an epic innings. It was not so much for brilliance as it was for the situation. In the face of the criticism for over an year on his waning form, culminating with the media asking him repeatedly about his retirement plans, he pulled out this knock. As much as it was a personal victory, it showed the declining force that Australia had become. Everytime Australia looked to press the accelerator they were pegged back by a wicket. It was his partnership with David Hussey that gave a semblance of hope to the bowlers
The perspective of the innings will be understood by many people. It was one of those innings that betrayed the game that he normally plays. He waited, struggled, grafted, attacked. Pretty much he did everything in this innings. Shortly put he played a knock that Tendulkar would have played atleast a 20 times out of his 48 hundreds
When the sun sets on his career, he would surely rate this innings somewhere among the best innings he played. But the man himself was pretty subdued in his celebrations on reaching the landmark. He certainly wanted the team to kick on from his achievement
When the Indian innings started, Sehwag was pretty subdued and Sachin was taking his time to get in. Sehwag ended his misery by top edging a pull shot to square-leg. Tendulkar took the Sehwag way as he scored a boundary of the very first ball he faced. After Sehwag’s dismissal, Tendulkar started conducting the symphony as he flicked Johnson off a good length ball and then opened the face of the bat to run the ball down to third-man
Just when it was looking like Tendulkar would run away with the match, Tait snared him with a good delivery. It wasn’t without some controversy as it was thought that the backfoot of Tait was cutting the side-line of the popping crease
Gambhir and Kohli then steadied the innings as they milked singles out of the spinners in operation. Kohli then went to a moment of madness as he lofted a full-toss straight into the hands of the midwicket fielder. Gambhir then had his moments of madness too as he misjudged a run with Yuvraj twice and was run-out on the third attempt
When Dhoni went it was still a tricky situation but Yuvraj strode over the bowlers and lived upto his name and Raina too aided him. India did an Australia over Australia as they played as a team and every member had some part to play
The defining images from the match will be Ponting and Lee. What speaks bad about the crowd is the fact that they booed Ponting. They should have had grace enough to appreciate the masterclass he played today. Well they have far too many memories of being at the receiving end and this booing does a small part in erasing it. Doesn’t it? Lee had the grace to go to the batsman and congratulate them. Wonder what made the crowd miss it
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