IND vs PAK, T20 World Cup: Bumrah’s dismissal of Rizwan turns the tide as India script epic New York comeback

The sun basked down. India celebrated ecstatically; Pakistan plunged to sorrow. India wrapped a famous win in New York, hatching a comeback for the ages, and pushing Pakistan to the brink of an early exit, riding New York through a riot of emotions.

The moment India won the game came in the first ball of the 14th over. The stumps lay flattened. Mohammed Rizwan, on his knees, dragged himself onto his feet from the pits of disgust. Jasprit Bumrah was wheeling away wildly, his equally excited teammates leapt onto him. The match almost in the jaws of Pakistan, Bumrah produced a moment as only he could. He breathed life into the game; he brought the crowd back on the feet, he switched light into the face of sullen faces of India’s supporters.

Before this precise moment, Rizwan was guiding them with utter composure, a sensible approach and without resorting to anything wild. He is Pakistan’s coolest head in a chase, though he often makes a fuss with injury breaks, wincing and grimacing, conveying a false impression that he is under immeasurable duress. Before this moment Pakistan were 80 for three, only 40 runs adrift of overhauling India and keeping themselves in the tournament, after their shock defeat to the USA. It was a precise moment they could ill-afford.

Suspense bathed the stadium, like the sunshine. Fans watched the action with breathless tension. Every ball was an event, graphically clear in their mind. There was no past, no future, only the present flickered in front of them. The required run-rate mounted. Fielders bustled with intensity, created an impression that there were 20 men on the field. Boundaries eluded; runs dried up, pressure soared, nerves snapped. This was an India-Pakistan at this intense best. Bowlers struck a devastating rhythm, every ball seemingly a grenade.

The score would soon be 88 for 5, after Rishabh Pant collected Shadab Khan’s top-edge. It was a facile catch, compared to the pirouette-snaffle of Fakhar Zaman earlier. In a sense, it was his wicket that injected belief among India’s seamers. In many ways, Pant was the day’s protagonist. His 31-ball 42 was the reason India crossed the three-figure mark. Fortune winked on him, but he made the best of it too.

Pant’s audacity

Despite wickets falling around him, he didn’t shed his audacity. The no-look falling lap shot embodied it. It is the antithesis of the orthodox batting principles. Steady head, balanced body, body flowing towards the direction of the ball in the follow-through. Pant just keeps falling and falling to the leg-side, until he plunges fully on the ground. Sometime during his descent, he becomes still for a split-second, the head and body in a diagonal balance, and swirls his wrists, a furious circular motion and pierces the gap between the leg-slip and the wicket-keeper. Pant, helping himself off the ground, smiled impishly. Pakistan’s seamers stood bedazzled. Maybe, it’s orthodoxy as Pant comprehends it.

The stroke carried multiple risks. The pitch was two-paced; Haris Rauf could be supersonic; he had just lost Axar Patel. Never mind. Pant has been through worse. Either side of this mini-counter, he lofted Rauf over cover and clipped him off the pads. The burst of explosion came from nowhere. Until the moment, Pant was all gropes and edges, a beneficiary of clumsy fielders. Thrice he was dropped (5, 9, 18); he edged, miscued twice as many times. Then, those familiar with him would know he could go from pauper to prince in the twitch of an eyelid.

But just when he seemed to snatch the game from Pakistan’s grasp, Pant departed.

The wicket came in the middle of a phase of madness when India lost seven runs and four wickets in the space of 18 balls. From nowhere, India crumbled like a hot cookie from 89 for 3 to 96 for 7. The innings was akin to an end-to-end football game, where both teams showed their rough and smooth edges, when method interspersed madness, producing an anxious edginess.
Pakistan’s pace pair of Mohammed Amir and Naseem Shah conjured sensational spells of pace bowling. Not perhaps as spectacular as they could be, but displaying the cunning and smarts to set the cat among the pigeons among the batsmen.

The meltdown began with Haris Rauf nailing Suryakumar Yadav with a full ball that tailed in a tad and bounced more than he had expected. It took the splice of his blade and the ball soared into the hands of mid-off. But it was Naseem Shah who showed him the way. A delectable blend of pace and wisdom, calm and exuberance, an action made-in-heaven, he pounded the deck hard, produced inward seam movement, slipped in the odd off-cutter and hurried the batsmen with his slippery pace.

Earlier, he burst through a hideous swipe off Axar Patel to break a 41-run stand, showing the virtues of bowling pace to his colleagues. He returned to nail Shivam Dube, his feet tied to the crease as though layered with three coats of cement that would have made his IPL employers, largest suppliers of cement in the country, proud. He hit the perfect length for the surface—between six and eight metres, bringing the natural variation into play, as well as letting his raw pace and command of length trouble the batsmen. Rauf would then polish the tail, ratcheting the pace with every ball, touching 150 kph by the end of it.

But for all the vitality and guile of Pakistan, and a pitch where the ball stuck in and stopped at batsmen, India’s batsmen deceived themselves. They misjudged the pace of the pitch at times, they miscalculated the dimensions of the ground.

Both Rohit Sharma and Hardik Pandya, fresh from playing on smaller IPL grounds, with disproportionate side boundaries, discounted the longer boundaries on the leg side and held out in the deep.

They were also battling ghosts that didn’t exist, fearful of the vile nature of the wicket, and assumed that the best method was to hit out of trouble. Pakistan’s seam bowlers bowled intelligently, the surface threw tantrums every now and again, but in the end, India’s seamers came to their rescue.

Brief Scores: India 119 all out in 19 overs (Rishabh Pant 42, Axar Patel 20; Naseem Shah 3/21) beat Pakistan 113/7 20 ovs (Mohd Rizwan 31; Jasprit Bumrah 3/14, Hardik Pandya 2/24). by six runs

Get latest updates on T20 World Cup along with live score updates for all matches.

Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.