T20 World Cup: New Zealand Crush India As If Fulfilling The Hot Favorites’ Death Wish!
Ishan failed after hitting a four; KL
Rahul, relentlessly being promoted as an opener while he ideally remains
India’s best No.3 batsman in all formats, failed again; Rohit Sharma, probably
unable to adjust to his first-time-in-life No.3 position, failed to push on
after hitting a few lovely shots; and captain Virat Kohli added to the drama
created by him and his advisers by failing too, reducing the hot favorites of
the tournament to 48/4 in the 11th over. It was now up to Pant and
Pandya to do all the repair work. Pandya fully vindicated his captain’s faith
in him by becoming the second highest scorer of the innings at 23 off only 24
balls and the highest scorer being Ravindra Jadeja at 26 in only 19 balls, and
thanks to them India brilliantly managed to cross the daunting 100-run mark,
setting an equally impeccable target of 111 to get for New Zealand. Wow! What
an achievement! Earlier, Kohli took in Shardul Thakur too in place of
Bhuvaneshwar Kumar to strengthen India’s bowling attack, apparently unable to
understand the fact that India actually needed at least 10 bowlers to get New
Zealand all out, if the wicket-keeper could be spared the trouble.
However, the Kiwis were in a merciless
mood to fulfill India’s death wish, because they fully realized and were sympathetic
that their beloved fellow cricketers have been suffering from IPL-fatigue,
bubble-fatigue and all the fatigues imposed on them by an equally merciless
cricket board. Therefore, they did not tire the Indians much by sparing the
labor of more than 5 overs at 111/2 ,
winning by 8 wickets. Now the ideal moves
would be for Kohli to prepone his stepping down from T20 captaincy, for Ravi
Shastri to resign and for the mentor-Dhoni to mentor the team to a healthy
mindset of returning home sooner than later. Anyway, fans need not be discouraged, because the
Blues though in the blues can still make it by defeating Afghanistan, Scotland
and Namibia along with scoring tons of runs to improve their net run-rate and Afghanistan beating New Zealand. Even
otherwise, fans can still watch their superstars in the flowing commercials
without minding their absence in the field.
In other matches South Africa managed to
beat Sri Lanka at the death yesterday to keep them in contention for a
semi-final berth in Group-1. England, the bulldozer in Group-1, kept on their
act by crushing Australia in the other match yesterday amassing 6 points from 3
matches and almost sealing their semi-final berth. Tomorrow's match of
England Vs Sri Lanka and the and the double header on November 2 including the match of South Africa Vs Bangladesh are set to clear up the
Group-1 prospects a lot. Earlier today, Afghanistan registered their second
huge victory by routing Namibia by 62 runs rising to the second position with 4
points and a very healthy net run-rate.
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