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Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Hero Cup Semifinal

This was played between India and SA in the C.A.B. Jubilee Tournament, played at the Eden Gardens.

India batted first and scored a not-to-good score of 195 in the first innings of the ODI. Azhar batted well on his favourite ground scoring 95 with support from Praveen Amre (the forgotten middle-order batsmen of 1990s).

In reply, SA were cruising at 106 for 3 when they started losing wickets. This was the time when Jadeja used to bowl regularly in ODIs and he picked the useful wickets of Rhodes and Symcox. Kumble chipped in with the wicket of Hudson (the top-scorer for SA). With this, the innings changed course and Brian Mcmillan was left at one end shepherding the tail to meet the Indian target.

Things came to a standpoint when 6 runs were required of the last over with SA having 2 wickets in hand. Sachin grabbed the ball from Azharuddin's hand and started bowling the final over with Devilliers on strike.

Of the first ball of the over, devilliers gets run out and Mcmillan comes to take strike. This was the crucial strike for India - Not only had they one run conceded less but they had managed to take a wicket off SA. It was stupid of Devilliers to try the 2nd run since one run would have got Mcmillan on strike. Anyway, the second ball to Mcmillan yielded juest 1 more run to him - He was also tense now since there were not any more wickets left.

Alan Donald on strike now and 4 balls, 4 runs to go. The next 2 balls were simply MAGIC balls from Sachin Tendulkar which were all dot-balls. Donald tried his best to strike the ball to the corner and squeeze a single and put Mcmillan on strike. But, of no avail. 2 balls, 4 runs to get.

The fifth and 6th balls resulted in singles by Donald and Mcmillan and hence India won the match by 2 runs. It was really a great spell of containment by Sachin Tendulkar in restraining SA to win the match. The confidence Sachin had in himself while believing that he could pull it off was really STUPENDOUS!!!

More than a decade later, Sourav Ganguly tried the same trick with Inzy of Pakistan but Sachin couldnt repeat that magic (the required runs were 3 of the last over and Sachin brought the match till the last ball before Inzy scored the required runs).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Check out the highlights of this great match @ http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3279855583336432281&q=hero+cup

Suyog said...

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Suyog said...

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