Certified Legendary Thread 2023 ICC Men's Cricket World Cup Game 48 The Final India v Australia 19/11 1900hrs @ Narendra Modi Stadium

[AJ_2000]

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p.s that 92 kiwi side really is one of the bigger choke jobs that has been forgotten, 7-1 in early stages facing a 4-3 pakistan side that only limped into semis due to rain in other games playing home semi at eden park and they blow it.

That one loss was against Pakistan was at the end of the group stage, and if NZ had won it created a path for Australia to make the semi finals (with a win over the Windies on the same day), and would have resulted in a NZ v Aus semi in Sydney (not in NZ) as that was an agreement in place for hosting.

So the Kiwis tank and set 167 which Pakistan chase down with ease and lock them in to a semi final.

Thankfully they then get justice served up to them with a baby faced inzamam ul-haq peeling off 60 from 37 to drag them home in an unlikely run chase.

 

[PhatBoy]

How long have World Cup's been going? if you don't understand knockout finals & peaking at the right time by now you never fukcing will.

They’ve happened 13 times and most Indian fans have been following cricket for maybe 8-9 of them at the most. That’s the equivalent in footy terms of less than a decade. It’s 4-5 years for someone like me that follows two codes religiously. In a decade of footy, how often does any fan have to console themselves with the notion, or really think too much about the idea of ‘we were the best but won nothing.’ Not a lot if at all.
It’s really only happened to Geelong once in 16 years of being at or near the top. There were a few years we were close or debatably ‘the best’ but only once where it clearly happened and even now 15 competitions and 3 more premierships later it STILL pisses a lot of us off.
It’s happened to India twice “in a row” to some extent and probably hurts more because ‘there’s always next year’ doesn’t apply. You have to wait four of them.
They don’t really seem to know how to deal with it because really, they don’t get many opportunities to have to.

 

[dogs105]

In every 50 over World Cup in the last 30 years, the Australian team has either won tournament or had their hopes of becoming world champions dashed by the eventual champions.

Dashed by Pakistan getting 1 point for rain in 1992 too...

 

[PhatBoy]

They’ve happened 13 times and most Indian fans have been following cricket for maybe 8-9 of them at the most. That’s the equivalent in footy terms of less than a decade. It’s 4-5 years for someone like me that follows two codes religiously. In a decade of footy, how often does any fan have to console themselves with the notion, or really think too much about the idea of ‘we were the best but won nothing.’ Not a lot if at all.
It’s really only happened to Geelong once in 16 years of being at or near the top. There were a few years we were close or debatably ‘the best’ but only once where it clearly happened and even now 15 competitions and 3 more premierships later it STILL pisses a lot of us off.
It’s happened to India twice “in a row” to some extent and probably hurts more because ‘there’s always next year’ doesn’t apply. You have to wait four of them.
They don’t really seem to know how to deal with it because really, they don’t get many opportunities to have to.

Having said all of that you would think more than a decade of IPL would have conditioned them to the idea of being able to finish on top without winning the trophy.

 

[kickazz]

I did read a story about the Indian reaction and I’m sure some comments here have alluded to this factor as well, Indian fans MOSTLY only follow cricket so they’re conditioned to a best team wins scenario generally: best team wins a series unless there’s a rain saving incident etc, and tournaments like world cups only come around every so often. And when those tournaments do come around, they’ve only been ‘the best’ a handful of times where they’ve had to concern themselves with both ‘being the best’ AND walking away with the trophy.

Yeah this is an interesting point.

I think it also has to be acknowledged: they were clearly the best side in the round robin tournament, and you can probably add semi final to that too. Ten wins in a row, and a considerably higher NRR than anyone else. Yes, Aussies only lost one more game than India in the end but we had a couple of shaky wins and our losses were poor.

Undefeated, clearly best team, just lost the final. I think they can be excused for a bit of "we should have won" or even "we were the best team"

The bit I can't abide is some of the talk of "Play the game ten times and India win 9" (95 out of 100 from some). Australia were building nicely and the game still had to be won. India were clear favourites, but before the game, the people who were prepared to risk their money on it had it basically 2:1 in India's favour.

Clear, but not comprehensive favourites.

 

[kickazz]

On the tournament in general:


Was too much made of "pitch doctoring"? The NZ semi was a bit suss how they switched at the last minute, but overall - I think they produced typical Indian wickets that seemed to have a bit for spinners and pace - and probably favoured batters too much. But that is modern ODI cricket everywhere.

Also I agree with the "World Cup hosted in India for India" thing - the late schedule release, selling tickets to Pakistanis then not letting them come, the presentations etc - it was all a bit of BCCI chauvinism. But apart from genuine minnow games, I've gotta hand it to the Indian fans who attended and really got into some of the neutral games, even wearing tops of countries and making signs of support. Maybe that was all set up for show, but maybe it wasn't - it certainly seemed from afar that they were genuinely getting in to it.

 

[Grasshopper17]

Can someone with passing knowledge of psychology explain the general mentality of Indian cricket fans? It’s very very odd

I have a far-less-than passing knowledge in most things, certainly psychology!

But I'm going to try anyway. Sorry this turned into a massive ramble. Hope someone is able to make sense of it

I have a colleague at work, he's been with us for about 8 years. Indian chap. Been in Australia for almost 20 years, almost half his life. Lovely bloke. Clients love him, because he will bend over backwards for them to help out however he can. But, to that end, he is EXCESSIVELY polite. Like, he will use 100 words to say things we will use 5 words to say (particularly when it's not what the client wants to hear).

My role has changed in the business over the years but back when he and I did the same job, we'd often have a bit of a good-cop-bad-cop routine going, usually unintentionally. But it actually struck an ok balance between getting sh!t done while keeping clients onside when things didn't quite go how they wanted. He has the patience to deal with those sorts of situations that I had/have virtually none of.

Anyway what does all that have to do with the price of eggs...

When I heard Ravi Shastri's carry on at the coin toss, and then obviously at the presentation ceremony, my reactions were the same: "get the f@ck on with it!"

And I sort of had this realisation that it all comes back to their underlying culture. Everything is so scripted and overloaded with pomp and ceremony, which is probably in large part due to the Bollywood influence. And in fact it's quite likely that the two (culture + Bollywood) over many years/generations have fed off each other to create this infinite feedback loop of excess grandeur. I'm sure these tendencies go back further than Bollywood, where they came from originally I'm not so sure?

Obviously here we're very much at the opposite end of the spectrum... We're all about "hurry up and give us the cup... There's beer to be drunk".

But on this whole Bollywood thing, as an outsider it seems as though Indians sort of have this expectation that things are going to go according to some predetermined script. It's like a movie, they might not know exactly what happens in the middle, but they know the good guy always wins.

So to me this goes a long way to explaining (a) their brash overconfidence prior to the Final, (b) their shock and silence during the match (literally not knowing what to do or how to respond to unexpected events) and finally (c) the saltiness and bitterness post-match, where so many of them were in denial, accusing us of cheating (god knows how), while proclaiming their team is still the champions in spite of Sunday's result.

It also goes a long way to explaining the sheer lengths their people in power go to in order to manipulate situations in their favour, ie a 10 team World Cup, having the Final in Ahmedabad, changing/doctoring pitches etc.

This is going to sound condescending for a citizen of a 200-year-old country to say, but it strikes me that India as a nation has a bit of growing up to do, so that it can grow into its own shoes as a global superpower, both on the sporting field and economically.

Up until the advent of Sourav Ganguly and the IPL, India had a great many talented cricketers but they also had this sixth sense of inadequacy, that they weren't quite good enough, and due to that insistence on following scripts etc, they were never able to rise up and challenge the global pecking order. (I'm ignoring 1983 here because it was essentially a one-off and not really the start of anything prolonged)

Ganguly challenged and changed all that, and we hated him because of it. He was arrogant, haughty and stuck up, but he was exactly what India needed at that time. He challenged the underdog tag his team generally had when they travelled, and even when they played good teams at home. He taught his teams to rise up in spite of that underdog tag.

Then the IPL came along and changed India's place in the world economically as well.

So, a generation later, this was the World Cup where EVERYTHING was in their favour. The foundations laid by T20 and Ganguly had all led to this. Home grounds, fantastic players, well led, etc etc. But the one thing they were relatively inexperienced in is how to respond when the underdog or lesser team challenges you in the heat of the crunch game.

We've all seen this in enough big games here. The 2017 Grand Final sticks out to me in recent memory. But the crushing burden of favouritism and expectation is not something that India's cricketers have had to deal with too often. Ignore bi-lateral tournaments and T20s and test matches etc for a moment... For India, Sunday was their Mecca. All roads had been leading to Sunday's match for 4 years, possibly longer. And while everything was fine, everything was fine.

But it only took Iyer being caught behind for the shutters to go up, and people didn't know where to look. Plan A wasn't working, and suddenly there was no Plan B, so nobody knew what to do. Because when you write a good script, you only need one.

So I really see Sunday's match as a real crossroads moment. I think this scenario is unlikely, but it has the potential to irrevocably scar their cricket landscape for decades. They had exerted so much energy (physical and emotional) into this tournament, and indeed to the Final, that this could really knock the stuffing out of them, burst the balloon, and lead to South Africa-like failures in big moments for years to come.

However what I think is most likely, is that they will, after a fair bit of soul searching, learn to recognise games like Sunday in a somewhat healthier manner, more as part of a continuum. That yes, winning would be fantastic, but even if they lose, the sun will still come up tomorrow, we still love our team, and anyway there's another game on Thursday.

More importantly, from a player perspective, they will learn the resilience necessary to learn from such crushing and unexpected defeats, and more importantly, learn the resilience necessary to turn situations around in-game. Firstly this comes from having Plan B, Plan C, etc, ready to go if needed, and this leads to having the emotional resilience to hang in there when things are, unexpectedly, going against you.

Part of that is also the preparedness to challenge people in positions of authority, in a way that benefits the greater good, rather than stroking individual egos. And the preparedness to take that feedback on board also, without being offended by it or disregarding it based on who gave it. Did anyone see any Indian players come up to Rohit Sharma in the field on Sunday night with a bit of "what if we try this?"

I think allowing their players to play in domestic tournaments outside of India will be a massive step in the right direction for them. Time will tell if the pompous BCCI is able to see over the rim of their own glasses on this one tho.

 

[PhatBoy]

On the tournament in general:


Was too much made of "pitch doctoring"? The NZ semi was a bit suss how they switched at the last minute, but overall - I think they produced typical Indian wickets that seemed to have a bit for spinners and pace - and probably favoured batters too much. But that is modern ODI cricket everywhere.

Also I agree with the "World Cup hosted in India for India" thing - the late schedule release, selling tickets to Pakistanis then not letting them come, the presentations etc - it was all a bit of BCCI chauvinism. But apart from genuine minnow games, I've gotta hand it to the Indian fans who attended and really got into some of the neutral games, even wearing tops of countries and making signs of support. Maybe that was all set up for show, but maybe it wasn't - it certainly seemed from afar that they were genuinely getting in to it.

I wasn’t looking forward to it: no West Indies, the idea that there was a hell of a lot of bullshit going on behind the scenes especially the Pakistan stuff (to me that could utterly MAKE a tournament - embrace the hate and let that rivalry be a real focal point instead of trying to just sweep them aside) and the usual sideshow of shit talk about pitches and whatnot but I warmed into it. There were enough good games to keep me interested, England struggling was as bizarre and perplexing as it was hilarious, the paradox of SA batting first vs SA batting second, Afghanistan’s emergence, Australia’s slow burn, NZ seemingly never dead but often unable to kill off an opponent either, and India ultimately probably paying a bit of a price for rarely being put under the pump at all.

It was a good tournament

 

[AJ_2000]

Was too much made of "pitch doctoring"? The NZ semi was a bit suss how they switched at the last minute, but overall - I think they produced typical Indian wickets that seemed to have a bit for spinners and pace - and probably favoured batters too much. But that is modern ODI cricket everywhere.
.

Totally. I think that it has less of an effect in a one day game compared with a test match as both teams will get a crack at a similar time. Plus teams are selected with a blend of quicks and spinning options, so they can adjust in game.

Still not watering sections of the wicket, over rolling other parts to nullify or create supposed advantage is hardly fair game for producing a good deck.

I wasn't bothered by it at all in the least up to the final, especially as India have both pace and spin options - just like Australia, except they're a bowler light in their lineup.

If anything trying to be find and advantage killed the deck and made it hard to score from without being unplayable, brining us back in to the game.

 

[philreich]

LOL I guess this means that the 1983 World Cup should be retrospectively awarded to the West Indies, because the best team didn't win that year either .

 

[AJ_2000]

View attachment 1859207

LOL I guess this means that the 1983 World Cup should be retrospectively awarded to the West Indies, because the best team didn't win that year either .

Technically the Kiwis morally won the 2015 world cup as they beat Australia by 1 wicket in the group phase. They can also claim 92 as they were on top after the group phase with only one loss.

Lots of Moral World Cups to be claimed now.

 

[James Colorado]

Most definitely.

I know Kohli rubs people up the wrong way but most of that comes back to him being a combination of incredibly good, and incredibly competitive.

Ashwin often crosses that line from
Good and competitive into f**kwit territory I think.


I did read a story about the Indian reaction and I’m sure some comments here have alluded to this factor as well, Indian fans MOSTLY only follow cricket so they’re conditioned to a best team wins scenario generally: best team wins a series unless there’s a rain saving incident etc, and tournaments like world cups only come around every so often. And when those tournaments do come around, they’ve only been ‘the best’ a handful of times where they’ve had to concern themselves with both ‘being the best’ AND walking away with the trophy.

In places like Australia, SA and NZ, we are conditioned with our year round codes to understand that being the best during a competition merely gives you a shot at the trophy.

It probably also explains why England sits somewhere in the middle because they follow the rugby codes but equally adhere religiously to the soccer leagues where it’s first past the post - and then have the knockout leagues as well

It was posted in a link earlier in this thread (can't remember the post), but an Indian scribe had mentioned how the knock out scenario is familiar to Australians due to AFL and the rugby codes, where the mentality is you do enough to get into a good position in the finals and then go up a gear. The situation in a lot of other nations is different due to the culture of their sporting competitions, as you mentioned.

 

[Satan]

Technically the Kiwis morally won the 2015 world cup as they beat Australia by 1 wicket in the group phase. They can also claim 92 as they were on top after the group phase with only one loss.

Lots of Moral World Cups to be claimed now.

Was it last time when england won when the ball hit the english batsman bat and they got 5 over throws? Moral victory to nz?

 

[Gough]

View attachment 1859207

LOL I guess this means that the 1983 World Cup should be retrospectively awarded to the West Indies, because the best team didn't win that year either .

We get '96 and at least a claim on '75 in return.

 

[grumbleguts]

Because he should have bowled Hazlewood in the semi-final, and we got lucky - why in hades did he persist with Zampa?

I believe there are at least four captains in that squad, which is why we did so well - Cummins, Smith, Marsh and Warner. Love them or hate them, their leadership and commitment to the team was what made us field like we did. I can't stand Warner, but his commitment on the field was sublime. Whenever Head or Maxwell opened their mouths, they were humble and supportive of their teammates

Really good of you to out yourself like that. Hazlewood brilliant at the beginning and the middle overs but has shown in the past that he is not a good death bowler at all.

 

[grumbleguts]

Was it last time when england won when the ball hit the english batsman bat and they got 4 over throws? Moral victory to nz?

It was 5 overthrows. They ran one AFTER the ball was thrown which should never have counted. They didn't even make it to a super-over without the umpires cheating.

 

[PhatBoy]

Really good of you to out yourself like that. Hazlewood brilliant at the beginning and the middle overs but has shown in the past that he is not a good death bowler at all.

In the past like at the last World Cup where he was in the 10 least expensive bowlers during the final 10 overs?

 

[Substance]

Some real cope going on. This is a brag about India's ICC ODI ratings:

And we are just devastated to lose the Rankings World Cup™, in addition to the Paper World Cup & Moral Ashes. The post-edgbaston "it feels like we won" mood is being matched here.

 

[JimmyBC]

 

[mcnulty]

Is anyone aware of where you might find a replay of the game? Thanks

 

[Satan]

Is anyone aware of where you might find a replay of the game? Thanks

Not in India , but try Pakistan

 

[Adelaide Hawk]

Some real cope going on. This is a brag about India's ICC ODI ratings:

And we are just devastated to lose the Rankings World Cup™, in addition to the Paper World Cup & Moral Ashes. The post-edgbaston "it feels like we won" mood is being matched here.

I would have thought "domination" would be 6 World Cups out of 13 when India has won only twice.

 

[kickazz]

Is anyone aware of where you might find a replay of the game? Thanks

Foxtel on demand if you or someone you know has it.

 

[010203]

Some real cope going on. This is a brag about India's ICC ODI ratings:

And we are just devastated to lose the Rankings World Cup™, in addition to the Paper World Cup & Moral Ashes. The post-edgbaston "it feels like we won" mood is being matched here.

With domination like that, it's amazing India didn't win the World Cup. The lesson for India, as the All Blacks have often found out the hard way, is World Cups are about qualify for and winning the finals. Nothing else matters.

 

[Grasshopper17]

I also felt that Cummins, like the team, peaked at the right time. There was some criticism of his tactics during the group stages, but it was as close to flawless as you can get come the knock outs.

Yeah I was pretty critical of what appeared to be the complete absence of a plan in the field in some of our earlier pool games, particularly the New Zealand game. However it could simply have been that Cummins was still coming to grips with captaining in the format... I had no idea he was so inexperienced captaining in ODI's before the World Cup. So in hindsight I'm willing to cut him a bit of slack in that area. Certainly the plans were very clear and obvious in the Semi and Final.