Indestructible India versus Irrepressible Australia

Pat Cummins, the most human of all Australian captains in the incredibly long history of this sport, always has a smile on his face. His predecessors, great and grim men, had made the scowl a near permanent aspect of the Australian leadership attire; nearly a requirement like the hallowed Baggy Green on their heads. But Cummins? He smiles handsomely even in the toughest of situations, be it on the Chennai field after he let India off the hook after having reduced them to three wickets for just two runs in the opening game for both these teams at this World Cup, or even at press conferences when Australia, mighty Australia, found themselves at the bottom of a long table after the first two rounds of group fixtures.

He even managed a constant smile from the non-striker’s end in Mumbai while playing Afghanistan, even when he knew in his bones that it would take nothing short of a miracle to pull Australia out of the hole that is 91/7 in a chase of 292 runs. That miracle rather miraculously manifested in the form of Glenn Maxwell, who played the greatest-ever innings witnessed in the 50 or so year history of one-day international cricket, an unbeaten innings of 201 runs that were hit with no feet movement, little running between the wickets and full-body cramps to take Australia into the semifinals of the tournament.

Then fast bowler Cummins found himself playing the rescue act with the bat in hand once again on Thursday night against the South Africans in Kolkata, this when his opposition simply refused to go away after being once reduced to 24/4 and later bowled out for 212. But the Saffers clawed back and turned the match into a nervy, jangling contest under the ominous clouds that tend to loom over West Bengal at this time of the year. On a spinning track, to make matters that much worse for the Aussies, Cummins was left with fellow quick Mitchell Starc to drag them across the line, which they did with a Cummins boundary just short of the penultimate over of the fixture.

The perma-smile immediately turned into a beaming grin, for, well against the odds, Cummins had taken his side to the World Cup final after having faced and somehow tackled every challenge that was thrown at them not just from opposition’s, but including internal problems for the squad too – from injuries to key players to late arrivals of other key members to mid-way exits of some others. But that’s just the Aussie way of going about things, make do with what’s there and importantly, without complaining. The country’s coat of arms, after all, has a kangaroo and an emu for a reason: neither bird nor animal ever takes a backward step.

This, then, will be Australia’s eighth (eighth!) ODI World Cup final, having already won five of the seven they have played in – the most by any team by a margin of three. But this will also be Australia’s toughest World Cup final yet; for waiting for them there is India, an invincible India who have gone unbeaten through the tournament and a side that have flattened superior teams to their opponents on Sunday. Which makes November 19 at the Motera in Ahmedabad a delectable finale – a match-up between the Indestructibles and the Irrepressibles. Something, hence, has gotta give.

“It’s why we play the game. We want to take on the best,” said Starc at the presser after the semifinal. “They’ve been the best in the tournament so far and we both find ourselves in the finals. So, that’s what World Cups are about. You want to take on the best throughout and we certainly have come up against a team that have obviously led from the front through the tournament and they’re undefeated. So, we played them in the first game of the tournament, now we get to take them on in the last. So yeah, what a place to be at the end of a World Cup.”

Truly, and the echoes of history agree as well. The primary reason why all of this seems vaguely familiar, like a déjà vu, is because back at the 2003 World Cup held in South Africa, India and Australia met at the very beginning of the tournament, just like this one, and ended up meeting at the pointy end of the final once again, just like this one. The similarities get even more eerie when one realises that going in the last game of the edition 20 years ago, one team had remained unbeaten for 10 straight matches and found themselves taking on a side that had refused to give up and surfed over the emotional ebbs and flows of the tournament.

The only difference is the switch in colours: now, yellow is the new blue. At the 2003 World Cup, Australia’s Ricky Ponting’s men went on to make it 11 wins out of 11 in Johannesburg, exactly what India’s Rohit Sharma will now be looking to imitate in Ahmedabad. But Sharma doesn’t believe in imitation for the sake of it, for he (and coach Rahul Dravid) have built a squad shaped after the gods. Every one in this side is in peak form and there are presumably no chinks in the armour, visible or otherwise.

Sharma has sacrificed his penchant of banging out big scores for the greater good of the team and has delivered the greatest of starts instead, all while fellow opener Shubman Gill has stood like a rock beside him. Then bats Virat Kohli at number three, who like his hero Sachin Tendulkar back in 2003 (another déjà vu), is the highest-scorer ever at a single edition of a World Cup, going past Tendulkar’s 673 runs from the South Africa edition with 711 runs thus far, studded with three hundreds and a ninety, in 2023. Following Kohli is Shreyas Iyer, coming into this final with consecutive hundreds in the previous two games, while KL Rahul at number five not only has a hundred and a ninety to show; he is also by far the best wicketkeeper of this world event.

India easily boasts of the best batting line-up in this tournament, yet their bowlers are even better. Which should put into perspective just how phenomenal the five men who have been responsible for 85 wickets between them in this campaign, led by the seam position of Mohammed Shami and his subsequent 23 scalps, have really been. The Aussies know they are up against the best, possibly even the best-ever to have played in a World Cup – including perhaps their own side from the 2007 edition in the West Indies that went wholly unchallenged.

Will India go unchallenged too? Playing in front of a partisan crowd, in the biggest cricket stadium in the world and on favourable conditions for the hosts are just some of the factors to make an already daunting task look nearly impossible for Cummins & Co. But when asked about what he thinks of the enormity of the challenge that lies ahead, Cummins, with the smile that never leaves his side through thick and thin, succinctly summed his thoughts on Sunday for everyone in the cricket-watching world with two words: “Can’t wait.”

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Aditya Iyer

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