We mentioned in the last piece about the
new T20I cricket captain Rohit Sharma winning the toss in contrast to Virat
Kohli! And what a funny irony that in the third and last T20I match in Kolkata
today in which India annihilated New Zealand by 73 runs Rohit made a hat-trick
of winning the toss in sharp contrast to Kohli’s hat-trick in losing the toss
in the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup-2021. Now, this phenomenon is set to haunt the hardcore
Indian fans with the eternal question: had Virat retired from the captaincy before
the World Cup and Rohit taken over, perhaps, the scenario and the
excruciatingly painful results would have been different. Perhaps, again, the
demotion of an opener of Rohit’s record to the No.3 position in the crucial
match against New Zealand could have been prevented, and the Pandya-obsession
could have been avoided. Wishful thinking, you may say so! But, these are important
observations that you cannot deny!
Anyway, after winning the toss this time
Rohit decided to bat first—a decision perhaps prompted by the new head coach
Rahul Dravid who knows the Eden Gardens pitch very well crafting there the
historic partnership of 376 runs with VVS Laxman in 2001 against Australia winning
the Test Series 2-1and maybe Rohit wanted to experiment with batting first as
he may have thought that he could not expect to go on winning the toss forever—because
the Eden pitch could be turning more later in the evening. However, India team
management decided to rest Ashwin and brought in the nearly-forgotten leg-spinner
Yazvendra Chahal in his place; India also rested KL Rahul in view of the coming
Test series and gave another chance to opener Ishan Kishan. New Zealand rested
its standing skipper Tim Southee on workload management ground and brought in
Lokie Ferguson. For this match Mitchell Santner was assigned the captain’s
duty.
The opener duo of Rohit-Ishan made an explosive
start putting up 69 runs in the powerplay of 6 overs with Rohit scoring most of
the runs racing to his second consecutive half-century (56 in 31)) in just 27
balls with three towering sixes. Unfortunately, apart from the skipper no other
recognized batsmen could contribute much as three quick wickets fell to spinner
Santner (3/27) in the forms of Ishan (29), Suryakumar Yadav (0) and Rishabh
Pant (4). Soon, with the fall of Rohit Sharma to spinner Sodhi India were
reduced to 103 for 4 in the 12th over. After a brief partnership
between the Iyer-duo—Shreyas Iyer (25) and Venkatesh Iyer (20)—India seemed to
be in the same pattern of the batting-first side ending up at less than 170-180
runs as their 6th wicket fell at 140 in the 17th over. But
thanks to the bowlers Harshal Patel (18 in 11) and a big-hitting Deepak Chahar
(21 in just 8 balls) India could finally put up 184/7, the highest team score
of the series.

As Rahul Dravid would have expected the
Indian spinners made mincemeat of the Kiwis. After a briefly breezy start in
the first two overs wickets started falling in heaps as left-arm spinner Axar
Patel took over and struck in his first ball getting the prize wicket of the
danger man Daryl Mitchell (5), then the scalp of Mark Chapman for a duck in the
last ball of the same over and then striking again in his second over clean bowling
Glen Phillips for a duck again. The backbone of the visitors thus crushed, New
Zealand could never recover. Chahal proved to be a little expensive, but he
took the valuable wicket of Guptill. Watching the ball turning Rohit tried
part-time spinner Venkatesh Iyer who also rewarded him with a wicket. Harshal Patel,
continuing from his previous debut-match, captured 2 wickets apart from his
batting performance. Finally, New Zealand folded up for a sorry 111 runs all out,
meekly giving India a huge victory by 73 runs and whitewashed 3-0 in the
series. Apart from Guptill (51), Tim Seifert (17) and Ferguson (14), no other
New Zealander could cross the double-digit mark.
Now,
over to the classic and the original format of cricket, that is Test Cricket. The
first of the 2-match Test Series is going to start from the 25th of
November 2021 in Kanpur. And naturally, there will be lot of changes in both
the teams with the short-format specialists leaving the teams to a
much-deserved rest. While the regular Kiwi skipper Kane Williamson is coming
back to join his team Virat Kohli is not available for at least the first Test
in and Ajinkya Rahane will lead India. With Ravichandran Ashwin and Axar Patel
the third spinner is most likely to be bowling all-rounder Ravindra Jadeja.
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