India 267 for 6 (Kohli 84, Iyer 45, Rahul 42*, Ellis 2-49, Zampa 2-60) beat Australia 264 (Smith 73, Carey 61, Shami 3-48, Jadeja 2-40, Varun 2-49) by five wickets
Dubai will host the final of the Champions Trophy, and India will be in it, after proving their edge over a weakened Australia side in an absorbing first semi-final. Their win wasn’t achieved without a fight, however, and Australia may yet look back on several moments that could have moved the contest in other, tantalising directions.
Rahul and Hardik hit five sixes and three fours between them, but even that late spurt didn’t take India’s boundary count (16 fours and seven sixes) past Australia’s (20 and eight). Their win, instead, was built on busy-ness: they only faced 124 dots to Australia’s 153, and ran 158 of their runs between wickets to Australia’s 129.
As much as this was down to the way Kohli and his colleagues – five other India batters got past 25 – moved the ball into gaps and ran between wickets, it was also down to the difference in quality between the two bowling attacks, particularly the spinners. India’s spinners ended the game with a collective dot-ball percentage of exactly 50, and Australia’s just over 39.
India stuck with their four-spinner strategy on a bone-dry pitch that promised plenty of turn, but as it happened, the surface was merely slow and low. India’s spinners didn’t necessarily have the means to run through the opposition, but they exerted far better control than their Australian counterparts, keeping the stumps in play and restricting the batters’ scoring areas.
For all that, Australia threatened at various points to run away to a 300-ish total after choosing to bat, and three of their batters played innings that could have been match-winning on another day. All three, however, fell just when they seemed at their most dangerous, and all three had a hand in their own dismissals.
Travis Head, put down by Mohammed Shami off his own bowling in the first over of the match, took a while getting to grips with the slowness of the surface, but peppered the boundary once he did, rushing from 1 off 11 balls to 39 off 32 to give India flashbacks of Ahmedabad 2023. Then, facing his first ball from Varun Chakravarthy in any format, including the IPL, he aimed big down the ground and miscued a wrong’un to long-off.
But with Australia 198 for 4 in the 37th over, he stepped out to try and drill Shami between cover and mid-off, only to lose his shape and miss a full-toss that crashed into the base of off stump.
Five balls later, Australia had lost another key wicket, with Glenn Maxwell following up a slog-swept six off Axar with a missed pull off a stump-bound skidder. The game had swung India’s way in the matter of minutes.
Carey was still there, though, and he was, perhaps, playing the innings of the match to that point. Coming in at a tricky juncture – Australia were 144 for 4, and Ravindra Jadeja had just sent back Labuschagne and Josh Inglis in quick succession – he counterattacked decisively, picking vacant spots in the outfield and attacking them with no half-measures. His first boundary, off the sixth ball he faced, set the tone, as he backed away to expose all three stumps and create room to loft Jadeja over mid-off – the length didn’t quite allow him to middle the shot, but he went through with it in the knowledge that there was no fielder patrolling that boundary.
In that vein, through sweeps, lofts over the covers and reverse-sweeps, Carey had motored to 60 off 56, but just when it seemed imperative for him to bat through the innings, with Australia seven down in the 47th over, he turned around for a risky second run and was caught well short by a brilliant direct hit from Shreyas Iyer two-thirds of the way back at backward square leg.
All these moments added up to Australia being bowled out for 264, with three balls remaining.
More to follow…
Karthik Krishnaswamy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo
