Irfan Pathan had not had the best of two days. He had been taken for runs and plenty of them in the first final and then again at the Gabba. Yet here he was given the last over of the match where Australia needed 13 runs to win and take the tri-series into a third final. There must have been all kinds of thoughts going through his mind and maybe he was kind of hoping that the skipper didn’t give him the ball but gave it to someone else. The skipper did show his hand by giving Harbhajan the 48th over which was the off-spinner’s last one and which meant that the remaining two overs had to be spread between Sreesanth, Pathan and Chawla or maybe even Yuvraj. That allowed Pathan to loosen up and get his body prepared for the one big final over. The question all round the ground was whether his mind was ready for it. Well, he showed that it was by bringing all his experience into play and bowling two craftily disguised slower deliveries taking the pace off the pitch and making it hard for a batsman to slog him, for slog it was going to be and not an elegant cover drive. Certainly not when 10 runs were needed. Both batsmen deceived completely by those deliveries hit too soon and too hard and barely got the toe end of the bat to their attempted big shot and spooned simple catches to mid-wicket. That sealed an incredible win for India in the tri-series. Mahendra Singh Dhoni deserves the highest praise for his handling of the players in a nail-biting tense situation and keeping calm when everybody was running around offering him their bits of well meaning advice. He is a winner and India is fortunate to have him at the helm of their young side. India is also lucky that they still have Tendulkar showing the same boyish enthusiasm that he displayed 19 years ago when he first came to the notice of the cricketing world. After all the talk about him not being a good scorer when India was chasing, he got as good a century as one could hope to see and won the first finals for India. In the process he also got his first one-day ton in Australia and then someone pointed out that he has an international century at all Australian Test grounds bar Brisbane and so as he proceeded serenely through the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties it looked that he would set that right too. His dismissal to a strange looking chip shot denied him that but he had set up the innings once again firstly with his opening partner Uthappa and then in a rollicking partnership with Yuvraj. That India somehow failed to get close to 300 was hard to believe after the platform that the little champion had created for those that followed him.
In the end the youngsters kept their nerve like they did in the finals of the even shorter Twenty20 World Cup and that’s the best sign for Indian cricket. That there are guys out there with ice in their veins who are not afraid to lose in order to win.
Well done India.
