Life in six balls: How the Indian 'team' won a thriller
Bangladesh are 136/ 6. They need eleven from the final over. Mahmudullah is on strike. Victory is not a guarantee, but it is well within reach.
There is a three-man conference. The captain Dhoni, Ashish Nehra and Hardik Pandya. They have to decide who will bowl the last over. Win, and their hopes are still alive. Lose, and their fate is not in their own hands.
The discussion is over. Hardik Pandya is the chosen one.
Pandya strides forth confidently. There’s some banter with the umpire. There’s a huge grin plastered across his face. It’s as though he is grinning more to convey the impression of confidence, to cover up his own apprehension, to not betray the undoubted nerves he must be feeling. It’s as though he is silently saying, “This, ladies and gents, will only end one way or another. Those who are about to die, salute you!”
Certainly not the most sincere of smiles, then. But this is mental warfare, and every psychological point he scores here can prove to be crucial.
Dhoni moves his field around. He’s a thinking captain, a cricketer with a deep tactical understanding of the game. I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.
Or maybe he’s just following one of Shane Warne’s old psychological gambits: creating the illusion that something is happening even though it’s actually not. Just to psych out the man with the helmet and the piece of willow.
The first ball
19.1 Widish and slightly tame. Mahmudullah has to reach out a bit but pushes it into the offside field and takes a single. 10 runs needed off 5 balls.
Still on a knife edge. Still hanging in the balance. Still not palpably closer to a conclusion.
Dhoni waves his arms around a bit more.
The second ball
19.2 Pandya goes wide again. But sorry, no dice. Mushfiqur takes two huge steps and cracks that infernal piece of cork for four huge runs.
And there is silence. Deafening silence. Numbness. 6 runs needed off 4 balls.
The elder statesmen, Dhoni and Nehra, try to calm their young teammate down. A word in the ear, a helpful bit of advice. In the hope that the over will right itself. Only in the hope.
The third ball
19.3 The diminutive Mushfiqur takes another large step to his right and scoops the ball. Dhoni leaps to his left but misses. It’s another boundary. 2 runs needed off 3 balls. The game is over.
Mushfiqur didn’t even catch all of the ball. It wasn’t a crisp hit. It wasn’t a sign of his dominance over the Indians. It ‘only’ had just enough to take it past the keeper. But it was enough.
He is, personally, exultant. He’s got his chance. He’s become a hero. It is he, and he alone, who struck those two boundaries.
The stadium is silent. Bangalore is silent. All of India has been hushed.
The fourth ball
19.4 Shorter, slower. Mushfiqur takes a needless risk and swings wildly. He’s out, comfortably caught by Shikhar Dhawan in the deep. 2 runs needed off 2 balls. Three wickets in hand.
He had a rush of blood. He saw the next day’s headlines. “Mushfiqur leads Banglas to win by four wickets”. He is immediately slammed for his unnecessary hero complex.
Anyway, it looks like a hollow gesture. Dhawan is not smiling. Pandya is, but it looks merely cosmetic. A small personal victory.
The fifth ball
19.5 Shuvagata is the new batsman but Mahmudullah is on strike. It’s a poor ball, a full toss, but Mahmudullah lashes out and Jadeja, running like a madman, takes a splendid catch to completely change the mood in the ground. 2 runs needed off 1 ball.
It was another case of desperation to finish the match quickly. It was needless. And Mahmudullah is quite literally beating himself up about it.
The Indians are celebrating. But Nehra and Dhoni are, once again, in the cool conference. Their calm is staggering. In all the noise and fury that rages around them, how can the wise heads stay so calm? Especially when it is their sagacity that has turned the tables.
Perhaps they knew that this was going to happen. Perhaps the outcome doesn’t surprise them because this is how they planned it.
Dhoni’s removed his right glove. Maybe he has something else in mind.
The last ball
19.6 Pandya bowls another widish delivery outside off. But this time, it’s somewhat shorter. It jumps up, and Shuvagata swipes at it as though it were a fly. And he runs. Blindly. Mustafizur is already on his way up from the other end.
Dhoni has the ball. In his ungloved right hand. He doesn’t throw it at the stumps. He runs at them. He sprints. As though his life depends on it. India’s chances in the World T20 actually do.
He takes the stump out. Those knees have supported his weight for thirty-four-and-a-bit years but today they look as though they belong to someone fifteen years younger. He thinks he’s got there first. The decision arrives. He has.
*
Pandya isn’t even the principal point of discussion. Neither is Dhoni’s captaincy. Nor Jadeja’s catch. Bangladesh’s rash decisions get some attention, but not all of it.
It’s about all of these Indians today.
Mushfiqur tried to finish it himself. He tried to be the hero. He wasn’t. Mahmudullah tried to finish it himself. He tried to be the maverick. He wasn’t.
For long, Bangladesh were defined by their sense of the collective, of their joint effort, of their tightly-knit approach to cricket. They tried to break that perception. But it was as though the Cricket Gods were telling them that they weren’t cut out for this.
And on the other side are India, who, for ages, have been a team defined by individual personalities - even as recently as the last match against Pakistan with Virat Kohli – and how tonight they recorded the most incredible win of perhaps all of their lives, a nail biter that threatened to go one way for half an over and then went the other.
There is something about snatching late victory from the jaws of defeat that makes heroes of the team as a whole and remembers their achievement collectively. This was it. The heroes of 2016. Not hero.
The long pauses between the actual deliveries seemed almost deliberate. Any fan will tell you the waiting is the worst part. Each delay heightened the surreal sense of drama. It was like a Greek drama that should have been no more than six balls, but was stretched and extended to six acts. Life.