ICC Champions Trophy 2013 Final - LOL report

There are times when you miss Lalit Modi. Had he been heading the ICC, he would have looked at the weather conditions and moved the game to another venue in a nearby country. But fairy-tales of that sort happen only in the IPL, they say. May be the ICC should have just given the captains a hacksaw blade, asked them to cut the trophy into two halves and take it home.

Star Cricket started to run out of highlights packages. How worse could it possibly get when there are rain interruptions even in those highlights? Rain break within a rain break. Inception and all that. It was a long wait before the groundsmen finally declared the ground ready. “Wait a minute! This game must be fixed, how can the rain stop right in time for a T20?,” said nobody

Former India captain Sourav Ganguly was seen wearing a light blue suit, probably borrowed from Howard Wolowitz of the Big Bang Theory. There were more England cricketers than fans at the venue. We witnessed bright sunshine, as if Jadeja took a deep breath and blew the clouds away. Rohit Sharma got out before anyone could compare him to Tendulkar. Some call him a taller version of Justin Bieber, the others call him Barbie, but he did bowl well, did Stuart Broad.

And there came the Bollywood movie moment where the hero gets beaten up by the villain initially. England were firmly on top with India losing Raina and Dhoni quicker than they used to lose Gambhir and Sehwag at the top of the order. Virat Kohli dished out quite a few swear words with the bat before getting out to Anderson. Ashwin didn’t last long and was out in his signature fashion – run out. Clearly, Ashwin wouldn’t have starred in ‘Bhag Milkhaa Bhag’ if he were an actor. ‘Keep calm and trust Ravindra Jadeja‘, they said and India ended up with 129.

Ashwin can’t run. So Dhoni makes him stand in the slips. Ashwin doesn’t want to run. So he dives and catches everything. After he took a scorcher to dismiss Cook, Trott walked in and Indians weren’t too bothered. Trott has the habit of scratching his mark quite often and Indians expected him to also create rough areas for Ashwin and Jadeja by doing so.

Wickets kept falling! Root lost his wicket seconds after Kohli was brought in as a close in fielder. Maybe Kohli just asked Root which part of the face Warner punched him. The third umpire too seemed to be scared of Jadeja and made a blunder by ruling Bell out stumped, even though it wasn’t clearly evident from the replays whether his foot was grounded or not. Some believed it was just another one of Jadeja’s black magic tricks. Nasser Hussain would have definitely called the umpire a donkey had he been on air when that happened. Unfortunately, there was no tea break either for England to request Dhoni to reverse Bell’s decision.