Amid a successful run, team India’s challenge — ‘chase’ the ghost

New Delhi: Team India’s successful run in the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup is like a typical Bollywood movie. Its beginning is impressive and flashy. So far, all the top protagonists have done justice with their skills and their status. 

However, its end is going to be happy or tragic, one has to wait and see! Cricketing reasons suggest that there are possibilities of twists and turns in India’s remaining campaign. 

Its journey so far is a photocopy of the last two World Cups. Cricket lovers should pray that the ghosts of the last two mega events do not chase India this time either.

India has won all four encounters in the home World Cup. It has been smooth sailing so far. But Team India has to take some alerts as warnings for upcoming crucial matches.

Chasing dreams!

Team India chased the total in all four matches played so far successfully. India’s highest chase is 272 against Afghanistan. The rest of the scores were not challenging at all. Team India won this contest easily.

India is to play its next two matches against New Zealand (October 22) and England (October 29).

While batting first, New Zealand had set a target of 322 against the Netherlands and 288 against Afghanistan in this World Cup. It won both matches by a big margin.

England also made 364 against Bangladesh and won by 137 runs.

No team in the World Cup has forced India to chase above 300. It is going to be interesting to see how comfortably it achieves such challenging if it has to, targets in the coming matches!

“You can see how confident they (Indian batsman) are from the way they are scoring runs,” Indian Opener Shubham Gill said after the match against Bangladesh. 

"I think this is one of the things that was talked about. Especially leading up to the World Cup, we were not chasing those big totals. But I think having won all four matches while chasing, it's a great way to have that momentum with us in those big games that we'll have moving forward,” Gill added.

When batting first, India won five matches in the 2019 ICC World Cup in England. Additionally, Indian skipper Rohit Sharma scored five hundreds in the 2019 world cup.

Despite such an outstanding beginning, when England scored 337 in Birmingham in a league match, team India finished that match 31 runs short.

Even in the first semifinal in Manchester against New Zealand, India failed to chase a mere 239 runs.

Middle order yet to be tested

Winning in one-sided matches does not guarantee easy outings in crucial stage encounters like the Semifinals.

Team India won all four matches without any hiccups. It was a walk in the park for Rohit Sharma, KL Rahul, Shubhman Gill, and Virat Kohli.

Indian Middle Order have not faced any crises in the World Cup so far as target scores were not huge.

How the Indian Middle Order will respond to such situations for its journey to the Semifinal, is yet to be tasted and seen.