A match for the ages: Will an unbeaten India storm past the Aussie swagger?
As an epic rivalry plays out, on the biggest stage there is, it’s been a long road to this moment: odds-on favourites against the mighty Australia.
Twenty years on, the gnawing anxiety has not eased. India and Australia are in a World Cup final. Good for the game; not so great for the nerves.
No 1 going toe-to-toe with No 2 is what finals ought to be; a celebration of diversity in skills and uniformity of ambition. But for the average Indian fan, it will mean hours of stewing in nervous anticipation, second-guessing everything related and unrelated to cricket, wondering if this is how it’s all going to end.
What was that about beating the best to be the best? India have already done it twice, why not a third time? Well, this is Australia, a different beast in a World Cup final, going back decades.
Yes, India are playing their best cricket, possibly ever. As they were in 2003. Back then, unlike now, Australia had pummelled India in the league phase. Here, India’s string of 10 on the trot isn’t just wins packed together. It is a streak symbolic of everything India have done right, against every team at this level, on nine different pitches.
Still, it may count for nothing more than a fond sidebar. Which is why Sunday’s pre-game jitters will be intense.
Will India defend or chase? How will Rohit Sharma bat? What if he fails? And then Kohli too? How will Shreyas Iyer play those bouncers? Will Bumrah do what he wants to do? Can Shami be as effective again? The more one thinks, the more one dreads. The more one dreads, the more one frets.
Multiply that by 1 billion, then try to stand in front of it as one of 11. It was not like this in 2003. Maybe it was like this in 2011. And even then, there was no Australia waiting at Wankhede.
It helps to remember how cricket has progressed, and how the Indian team have evolved. It has a calm demeanour, a breezy sense of professionalism; none of that intense over-dependence on a single player. They are now a team that keep their own counsel and are unfazed by defeat, because they know the right boxes were still checked.
That India team of 2003, world-class without a doubt and similar in many aspects to the team of 2023, still hadn’t got the internal dynamics right. Professionalism wasn’t the order of the day the way it is now, and things would sometimes take ages to move. And yes, there was no Indian Premier League. No stage on which the unknown could make their mark and draw the attention of fans and selectors alike.
Today, the senior team is a subsystem of a larger order of things. Everything from scouting to fast-tracking talent to medical and logistical supervision has been structured and streamlined, with rigorous checks and balances inserted at different levels. Much as it was in Australia when they emerged as the gold standard of cricket.
The shift has been gradual but steady. Remember the 2008 Commonwealth Bank series; the best of three finals that India won in Brisbane riding on Sachin Tendulkar’s rich vein of runs before Praveen Kumar ran riot with the ball? Not for 23 years before that had India won a final in Australia.
And then in 2011 — almost eight years to the day that India’s hopes were steamrolled at Johannesburg — Yuvraj Singh and Suresh Raina shepherded India to an epic quarter-final win against an Australia that hadn’t lost a World Cup knockout game since 1996. More punches were landed in due time. India won a Test series in Australia with Kohli, and a Test series without him, with the pièce de resistance coming at the Gabba. Now India tour to win rubbers, not only to leave a mark.
On the other hand, Australia have slipped somewhat. With a ball-tampering scandal in 2018, Steve Smith and David Warner getting banned, it’s a superculture in freefall. Which is not to say that Australia don’t stand tall. This Australian team don’t have the heft of previous generations but if there’s one trait that’s been retained it is dogged aggression. Which is why Travis Head and David Warner still rile new-ball attacks, like Adam Gilchrist and Mathew Hayden used to. Likewise, Josh Hazlewood has been masterful with his Test lengths, a la Glenn McGrath. Yesterday’s Michael Bevan has been replaced by a one-legged mayhem-unleashing version named Glenn Maxwell.
They don’t baulk at 291 despite being reduced to 91/7. Neither does chasing 213 on a deceptive pitch make them open the batting any differently.
More unnerving is that unmistakable Australian swagger when they are on a roll. Neither Rohit Sharma, nor the prospect of playing in front of over 100,000 matters once Australia start peaking. “It’s why we play the game,” as Mitchell Starc put it, after Australia defeated South Africa in the semi-finals. “We want to take on the best. [India have] been the best in the tournament so far and we both find ourselves in the finals. So that’s what World Cups are about… they’re undefeated… We played them in the first game of the tournament. Now we get to take them on in the last game. What a place to be at the end of a World Cup.”
Australia don’t just play; they play to win. But then, so do the new Indian team.
