Luck strikes India at the right time

Well there have been two games in this tournament where India should have won and eventually lost. Those are the game against England and South Africa where India lost the plot mid-way defending a decent total. Despite those two huge losses, the Indian players in every department were no short of their body language and guts. They did everything well till yesterday's game against the Aussies which was their win against the team after 24 years. Had the even took place a year later, may be India would have celebrated a silver-jubilee of their win over the four-time world champions.

India had last won a game against Australia in world cups in the 1987 edition where the Mahammed Azharuddin-led team India beat the to-be world champions by 59 runs though they lost their other encounter against the Aussies by 1 run in the same tournament. Since then, India has been at the receiving end of the Aussies as many as 5 times. Coming to the tournament, in that match against England, India did very well to get to 338 powered with a hundred by Sachin Tendulkar but eventually not only lost all their ten wickets but an opportunity to win as well.

Though India lost 9 wickets for less than 30 runs and failed to play their complete quota of 50 overs, a score of 297 was not a bad one at all. The score was more than enough for the Proteas to shed their sweat. Had the Proteas been that tough to face, they should not have lost 7 wickets and played until the last over en-route to their successful run chase. That was the second bad luck that struck team India. One need not consider their win against West Indies to be a luck favoring India for West Indies are a team that only Holland can fear.

You can see from the scorecard about the panic that the Aussies had with not even a single bowler happening to bowl his complete quota of ten overs. The Aussies could extract only 1 over maiden when Brett Lee happened to be the lucky guy this time. Likewise, there were four bowlers from India to have completed their full quota of ten overs that included the likes of Yuvraj Singh and Ravichandran Ashwin. There were three bowlers from India to have been better than the four from Australia. Concluding the post, did the Aussies take the Indians for granted or was Dhoni lucky to have this his?