It’s time to celebrate the fantastic win of Team India by 124 runs (by D/L method) against their arch-rivals Pakistan in the first game of Group B in the Champions Trophy 2017. The much-awaited high-voltage game kickstarted with a fantastic batting performance by the Indian batsmen. Despite rain interrupting the game thrice during the entire game, Team India managed to put a competitive score which Pakistan failed to chase down and lost the game.
Earlier, Pakistan skipper Sarfaraz Ahmad won the toss and elected to bowl first. Like the previous edition of the Champions Trophy in 2013, India duo of Rohit Sharma and Shikhar Dhawan came to open and gave a slow and steady start to the team. Later, skipper Virat Kohli (81*), Yuvraj Singh (52) and Hardik Pandya (20) played an extraordinary cricket and put a total of 319 on the scoreboard in 48 overs.
Since then, the rain had played a spoilsport due to which the Duckworth-Lewis method was implemented and the target was revised to 324 in 48 overs.
Pakistan had a good start where Azhar Ali and Ahmed Shehzad added a total of 47 runs for the first wicket. In the 9th over, Bhuvaneshwar Kumar gave the first breakthrough to his team and took the first wicket by dismissing Shezad for 12 of 22 runs.
Azhar Ali continued his batting streak and ended up scoring a fifty but soon he too was gulped byRavindra Jadeja in the 21st over and he was dismissed right after scoring his half century. Apart from Ali, Mohammad Hafeez tried to add some more runs on the scoreboard but he could only contribute 33 runs. IN the 27th over, he was dismissed by Bhuvneshwar Kumar.
The rest of the team failed to perform thereafter and the entire Pakistan batting line up collapsed within 164 runs with 14 overs to spare. Wahab Riaz couldn’t come to bat as he injured himself during bowling. Thus, after the 9th wicket fell down, India was declared as the winner of the game.
Both the teams now have to look after their respective fielding departments as there were many loopholes when witness while bowling. Not only Pakistan but team India, which is believed to have some of the best fielders in the world, dropped several catches. Well, Virat Kohli was fortunate enough that Pakistan couldn’t take the advantage of those missed chances but for the rest of the games in this tournament, a special care has to be taken.
With this victory, India now tops the Group B Table with two points and net run rate above +3 mark.
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