Bengaluru (Karnataka) : Rohit Sharma's youthful warriors have meandered from Chepauk to Chinnaswamy, with pitstops at Motera, Kotla, Dharamsala, Ekana, Wankhede and Eden Garden without a blip and all guns firing.
The unbeaten eight-match run is now all set to culminate in Bengaluru where India meet The Netherlands in their last league match of the 2023 ICC World Cup before they fly to Mumbai for their big-ticket semifinal match against New Zealand.
India’s dream run, or should one say, grand slam trajectory, has beaten the law of averages thus far but within its incredible completeness it does hide some niggles – calling them vulnerabilities would be calling chalk cheese.
One of them is Shubman Gill and his long-awaited longevity in the middle after he returned from a dengue break. There is Shreyas Iyer too, who is touchy about any talk around the short ball or a pending century. There is also Surya Kumar Yadav for who SKY is the known limit but in this edition, where he got an inclusion into the playing 11 after Hardik Pandya got out injured, is yet to fire the way he can. Just 85 runs on a 21.25 average is not what he, his team or the fans expect from him. He is Mr 360 degrees but has strangely been caught at 45 degrees in the summit tournament thus far.
Of course, these are mere, niggles but niggles which need to be addressed and a match against the minnows, in practice for a semifinal for which India has already qualified, should ideally be the occasion to end the league phase on a high.
Not that the Dutch have been taking their new sport lying down. They got the mighty South Africans and Bangladeshis on their wrong foot, and also troubled other established teams as they learn on the job.
For India, however, the match would be significant for reasons other than just a win. The Chinnaswamy stadium at Bengaluru has long worshipped Virat Kohli and his bat, and not just because this is the home ground of his Indian Premier League (IPL) team Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB). Kohli has been working out on ways to give tenacity and perseverance the mental toughness needed by a sheet anchor and has, thus, far given enough confidence of playing out his assigned role perfectly to his skipper Rohit Sharma to launch fierce and fearless attacks at the mouth of the innings.
The strategy has worked six times in the league stage when it was tested, and every time Kohli and K L Rahul have delivered by standing tall as unbreachable dams of controlled run mounts. Against the Dutch, however, Kohli will be looking to get to his half century of ODI centuries and what better place can it come than in his spiritual cricket ground.
Kohli’s contribution as a staying power at No 3 has become more and more robust by the match, ever since he showcased his perseverance armour against Pakistan in Australia just the other year. Against the Dutchmen, it would be a comparatively effortless aggrandisement.
Other than Kohli, the bowling department has been impeccable, trouncing mighty oppositions like Australia, South Africa and New Zealand with the turn of the shoulder. From the quicks troika which has hunted in packs, going for the kill early in the innings and snacking by the time it is death overs, to the middle over spinners in Kuldeep Yadav and Ravindra Jadeja, there is no chink that will fold up with a contest.
This is the kind of soundness that has come to be associated with Team India which has made enough effort to rise above speculation or debate around its winnability in this tournament. And, it is no day for the D/L gentlemen to dampen up spirits and scores on the back of rain. On Sunday, the sky over Chinnaswamy stadium will remain partly cloudy but there is be no chance of rain. With 59 per cent humidity and 0 per cent precipitation, the maximum temperature will be around 27 degrees Celsius. The wind speed will be 19 km per hour.
Unfolding on Diwali day, the stands may not fill up, but Rohit Sharma who has been firing with the bat, Mohammed Shami has been doing with the ball, will be filling all the boxes – before he takes his warriors on the showstopper semifinal against New Zealand, who are known to strike back hard once bitten.
Let’s just fan away the thoughts and fears of what the Kiwis did to India in the 2019 edition. For now, it is the orange army that needs Sharma’s attention.
