CRICKET WORLD CUP
| FINAL 19-Nov | INDIA | 240 | |
| Ahmedabad | AUSTRALIA | 241-4 43 | [Head 137] ▪️ AUSTRALIA won by six wickets |
AUSTRALIA refused to read the script in India as Travis Head hit a stunning century to beat the previously unbeaten hosts and seal an amazing sixth Cricket World Cup title.
Head smashed 15 fours and four sixes - more boundaries than the entire India team combined - on his way to 137 as the Aussies ultimately coped easily with their run chase on a difficult used pitch in Ahmedabad.
The surface for the Final had been the subject to plenty of pre-match conjecture with India having also beaten New Zealand on a used pitch in Mumbai in the semi final.
But any attempt at influencing the result in the Final quickly backfired, or at least was neutralised, after Australia captain Pat Cummins won the toss.
Cummins elected to field, rejecting the traditional strategy in big games of putting a score on board to defend after recognising the conditions favoured the risk of making a chase.
Notably, three of the four league matches in Ahmedabad were won by chasing sides, and so were the two Indian Premier League finals which were hosted there.
Still, Cummins's decision could have gone very wrong - and his counterpart Rohit Sharma, with his aggressive strike rate, threatened to set the tone, just as he had pretty much all of the way through the tournament.
But, with two balls of the first powerplay remaining, Head made his first big intervention of the day with a wonderful over-the-shoulder catch to leave India on 76-2.
The Aussies sniffed an opening - and, sure enough in the next over, the in-form Shreyas Iyer feathered Cummins behind for just four.
India then entered into a prolonged period of introspection as Virat Kohli and KL Rahul set about a rebuilding job.
It was a painfully slow partnership, though - and the Indian batsmen actually only scored one single boundary in 173 balls between the start of the 11th over and the end of the 39th.
Indeed, just as Kohli might have considered upping the pace of his innings, Cummins breached his defences - and the capacity crowd in Ahmedabad fell completely silent.
"There's nothing more satisfying than hearing a big crowd go silent," said Cummins in his pre-match press conference.
Australia were well on their way with Rahul and new man Ravindra Jadeja continuing to find scoring difficult against an incredibly well-drilled, tigerish fielding side.
Jadeja was next to go, edging behind a thin nick off Josh Hazlewood to Josh Inglis who took five catches behind the stumps, and wickets thereafter fell regularly.
Twice, Mitchell Starc struck from round the wicket, inducing edges from Rahul and Mohammed Shami, to leave India on 211-7 and in danger of failing to use their allocated 50 overs.
Suryakumar Ashok Yadav seemed to lose his ability to farm the strike with the tail - and it was only really the scrambled efforts of final pair, Kuldeep Yadav and Mohammed Siraj, who ensured the home side faced all of the balls available to them.
Australia had completed the first part of job consummately then - but now also still had to hold their nerve with the bat.
In a frenetic start, Jasprit Bumrah immediately got the ball to swing and the very first delivery was edged by David Warner... through the slips to the boundary.
The second over, bowled by tournament leading wicket taker Shami, was no less eventful - and had the following outcomes in successive balls: a wide, a wicket, a bye, five wides, a four off the bat, a bye, and a leg bye.
During the chaos, with the ear-splitting atmosphere in Ahmedabad having resumed at full volume, Shami took his 24th scalp of the tournament by removing Warner - and the Indians' urgent necessity for quick wickets appeared to outweigh the Aussie desire to see the match settle down.
Indeed, at the end of the seventh over, Australia had been reduced to 47-3 after Mitchell Marsh swiped wildly to a wide delivery from Bumrah.
And, in his next over, the rapid paceman was judged by umpire Richard Illingworth to have successfully trapped Steve Smith lbw with a slower ball.
Smith, incredibly, walked off despite his reputation for reviewing just about any lbw decision against him - and, more incredibly still, replays showed that the ball had hit Smith's pads outside the line of off-stump.
It felt, at the time, like a match-defining error. However, Head ensured it was nothing of the sort.
Naturally aggressive, the Adelaide big-hitter toned down his approach somewhat as he set about turning over the strike with his new partner in the middle Marnus Labuschagne, while hitting the occasional boundary to avoid getting bogged down.
The pair compiled a steady partnership bringing up their century stand off 119 balls to bring the runs required target below 100 with 24 overs still available.
By this stage, Head had accelerated his innings to better than a run per ball - no mean feat on that strip - and, with a scampered single in the 34th over, he duly became the seventh man to hit a century in a World Cup Final.
Head actually would have been run out on 99 with a direct hit - and immediately made the Indians pay by smashing the next ball from Jadeja through midwicket for six.
Later, with his work just about done, Head could not resist another aggressive thrash at a wide ball from Siraj - but, for once, he could only direct it at chest height to Shubman Gill at deep midwicket for the simplest of catches.
It mattered not, though. From the next delivery, with 42 balls still to spare, Australia confirmed yet another Cricket World Cup Final victory as new man Glenn Maxwell ran two after guiding another short ball from Siraj into the same gap at midwicket along the ground.
To a man, the Indian players - all in stunned silence - collapsed to their knees in defeat.
It was not meant to end like this for India - after all, Sharma's men had crushed all-comers up until the Final.
India triumphed easily in all nine group games and had gained revenge in the semi finals against New Zealand for their defeat to the same team at the same stage four years earlier.
When batting first, the Indians had won by an average of 175 runs - and they were equally adept at chasing, winning by an average of 6.4 wickets with an average 64.4 balls remaining.
But, at the Final in the stadium named after him, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi watched on impassively - powerless, for once, to intervene as Head and Labuschagne nudged Australia towards their target.
By contrast, for the champions, this was a great victory forged by typical true Aussie grit.
Defeat in their opening two group games against India and South Africa had actually left the eventual winners briefly bottom of the table. Thereafter, though, Australia won each of their remaining nine matches.
Steadying the ship with comfortable victories over Sri Lanka and Pakistan, and a record-breaking 309-run thumping of Netherlands, the Aussies continued to find the route to the Final rather bumpy.
In their Trans-Tasmania clash, Australia squeezed past New Zealand by just five runs in a tightest match of the whole tournament - then, against England, the bowlers managed to defend a modest total of 286, winning by 33 runs.
The early struggles meant, even with their improved form, the Aussies could not be certain of their place in the knockout stage - and next up was a match against surprise package Afghanistan who remained in with a chance of the top four.
Chasing 292, Australia fell to 49-4 and 91-7 as the Afghans sensed their biggest scalp yet in what was a tournament of great success for them.
But Maxwell - who had earlier blitzed his way off 40 balls to the fastest century in World Cup history against the Dutch - produced an astonishing knock, scoring a massive 88.6% of the runs in an unbeaten eight-wicket partnership of 202 with captain Cummins, to finish on 201 not out.
Ultimately in the Final, though, it was opener Head who proved yet again to be the key man on the big day as he continued his annus mirabilis.
Already with player of the match performances against India in the World Test Championship Final in June and against South Africa in the World Cup semi final under his belt, it was not Warner or Smith who was the Australian danger man in this Final. Maxwell was barely required.
Instead, it was Head - an unusually understated and immensely underrated Aussie left-hander - who left a sixth world title for his country never in doubt.
