India 113 for 7 (Iyer 30, Rahul 26*, Duffy 3-35, Jamieson 3-35) beat New Zealand 134 (Mitchell 55, Santner 31, Brar 4-30, Kamboj 2-25, Axar 2-28, Nabi 2-31) by four runs (DLS method)
Rain taketh what rain giveth. Consistent rain on the eve of the second ODI between
New Zealand and
Indiawhich continued on match morning, played a significant part in giving us a pitch that hosted a rare low-scoring thriller in Wellington, but rain on the night of the match also denied us an organic finish. When the rain arrived to put a premature end to the 47-overs-a-side contest, India had just lost their seventh wicket and had scored 113 runs in a chase of 135. They were only four runs ahead of the DLS par score, a measure of how close the match was.
It was like batting on a trampoline, the only half-century-maker of the match
Daryl Mitchell said. It wasn’t just the steep bounce but the unevenness of it, plus the seam movement that made batting difficult. The very soul of ODI batting, the ability to work the ball into the gaps, was taken away. The lack of a pitch square in multi-sport New Zealand grounds made it even more difficult to place the ball in the gaps as it would just lose all the pace after bouncing in the lush grass.
With four fast bowlers in their XI, India didn’t go looking for wickets. They kept hitting the deck hard, the scoreboard moved slowly, and the batters had no choice but to eventually play low-percentage shots, which brought India wickets, four of them to
Gurnoor Brarhis personal best returns.
New Zealand had four fast bowlers as well, but they didn’t have the cushion of runs. They had to go searching at times, and India’s batters were good enough to punish those balls for boundaries. In fact, India just took the Mitchell method to a higher intensity. Mitchell would get into power positions and swing hard at anything remotely loose while defending or leaving good balls. Every India batter did that, which shows in 78 runs in boundaries out of just 113.
By the time the New Zealand batters had enough measure of the pitch to formulate a method, they had already lost three wickets. This is what can happen when you keep losing the toss, now six out of seven during this tour. Tim Seifert ended up chipping
Auqib Nabi to short midwicket after the first ten balls of the match had brought New Zealand no runs. If it was extra bounce that did Seifert in, Will Young was defeated by seam and bounce. Henry Nicholls, lucky to survive
Anshul Kamboj‘s accuracy early on was slightly unlucky in playing him on.
At 23 for 3, Mitchell and Tom Latham decided to be more cautious, but Latham chose the wrong ball to try to break the shackles. Brar was over the wicket and angling the ball across, which made the pull a dangerous shot. In the same over, Glenn Phillips fell to the same shot, but this short ball also jagged back in to take the top edge.
Mitchell Santner looked the most comfortable of all the batters on display as he added 59 with Mitchell for the sixth wicket. He had the advantage of getting to face spin, which India’s batters didn’t because New Zealand knew they would not need to bowl all their overs. However, Mitchell couldn’t take any advantage of spin, instead getting frustrated at not being able to get singles down the ground and managing just one run off six reverse sweeps. Having scored just 10 off 26 balls from
Axar PatelMitchell finally gave him the charge and ended up being caught at long-off.
The hostile Brar ensured a swift end to the innings with relentless short-pitched bowling. Even when he went full after pushing batters back, it was only just good length. A bouncer from Kamboj resulted in a concussion for Blair Tickner, which brought Matt Fisher into the XI.
Despite a golden duck for Shubman Gill, India were much more urgent in attacking the loose ball than New Zealand. Rohit Sharma scored 20 of his 23 runs in boundaries, Virat Kohli drove the second ball he faced for four,
Shreyas Iyer threw his hands at anything with width, and
KL Rahul scored his first 14 runs in boundaries.
The two tall new-ball bowlers,
Kyle Jamieson and
Jacob Duffywere still a handful. Duffy got Gill with seam and bounce, and Kohli with one that stopped on his cover-drive. Rohit did India a favour by facing 25 out of the first 27 balls that the menacing Jamieson bowled. Ten of those got the better of him but he still scored 21 runs.
Although Fisher got Axar in his first over, Smith and Fisher were not the same threat as some of the taller bowlers in the match. Or even Ticker might have been had he bowled. However, Santner didn’t stay in holding pattern for long and brought back his new-ball bowlers.
Jamieson took out Iyer with a nasty bouncer for 30 and Duffy had the wickets of Naman Dhir and Kamboj. The latter fell swinging hard at a length ball in what proved to be the last over of the match, leaving India precariously close to falling behind the DLS par. To be fair to Kamboj, though, the rain arrived without warning much like this low-scoring thriller in an era dominated by high scores.
Source: www.cricinfo.com
