T20 World Cup: How Surya’s men overcame double jinx with one trophy

A promotional ad of the ICC T20 World Cup playing out on TV recently showed Rohit Sharma, captain of the 2024 title winning team and this edition’s brand ambassador, egging on the Indian team to ‘beat history.’ The message was to buck the trend as no team has won two straight T20 World Cup titles – something which the Men in Blue delivered on Sunday night, and how.

 The emphatic  96-run victory at the cavernous Narendra Modi Stadium was only one part of the story though. It also exorcised the demons for the Indian team about the jinx that Ahmedabad had supposedly brought on them in the past – famously with the heartbreak in the 2023 50-overs World Cup final against Australia and in recent times, a humiliating 76-run defeat to South Africa in the league stages, which almost threatened to derail their campaign.

 This was certainly one of the most anti-climactic finishes in the history of the tournament – which puts to shade the Kiwis’ eight-wicket defeat to Australia in the 2021 final in Dubai. Kane Williamson’s men had, on that occasion, at least scored 172 for four against a formidable Aussie attack after being put into bat but eventually lost the game by eight wickets.

From an Indian fans’ perspective, this victory had been their most emphatic of the three finals so far – the most by any team. Just ponder their previous margin of wins – both were last-over affairs with India pipping Pakistan by five runs in the inaugural 2007 final in Johannesburg and then by seven runs in another close thriller against South Africa in Barbados two years back. Compare it with an almost predictable affair in front of nearly 87,000-crowd, whose celebration bordered on some toxic nationalism with it’s IPL-style DJs which resembled a bilateral rather than a World Cup final.    

The qualitative leap in India’s performance in this format did not happen in a day – rather it began with the humiliating semi-final exit of Rohit’s men Down Under in 2022. Fortunately for Indian cricket, the embarrassment of riches at their disposal made their job of playing in the gung ho format rather easy and the gap between them and other international teams had been increasing ever since.

  Looking back, this final would be better remembered as the one which saw Sanju Samson carrying on from where he had left off at Kolkata and Mumbai and Abhishek Sharma finding his mojo back after an embarrassing campaign - while the enigmatic Jasprit Bumrah underlined his class with figures of 4-0-15-4. For the record, Bumrah and Varun Chakravarthy emerged as the highest wicket takers of the tournament with 14 scalps each.

A calculated assault by the two Indian openers (which saw them equal a record score of 92 after powerplay) set the tone of the match when they finished at a daunting 255 for five after being sent into bat by New Zealand skipper Mitchell Santner.

It was not a cliché at all to say that the reigning champions literally toyed with the Kiwi attack, but the Black Caps have had a forgettable night. If taking the call of bowling on a belter with the prospects of dew looked presumptious as runs on the board always helps in a final, their normally disciplined bowling line-up looked a bundle of nerves – especially seamers Matt Henry and Lockie Ferguson who kept on spraying all over in trying to land the wide yorkers.

 No wonder, this allowed Abhishek to free his arms and he soon began to resemble the batter who was the nemesis of rival bowlers in the bilaterals over 2025 to earn the world No.1 batter’s ranking. He took his chances upfront with Jacob Duffy, the weak link among the pacers by picking him up over mid on and then mid wicket – and then came a trademark six over long off once it fell in his arc.

Only a few days back, Sunil Gavaskar said of Samson: ‘’He’s batting on a different planet, you could say. It’s as if he’s seeing the ball as big as a planet. Everything is so clear to him, just like the full moon today.’’

The soft-spoken Malayali vindicated the legend’s praise and his sequence of his scores in the last three matches ever since he was brought back was 97 (versus West Indies); 89 (vs England in semi-finals) and again 89 in the final. The three-figure knock may not be of much consequence with a World Cup title at stake, but his exit surely robbed the Indian innings of some tempo towards the end before Shivam Dube gave it a final push towards the 250-mark.