By the time Glenn Maxwell hit the winning runs on that dreaded day in November last year at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, the energy of the crowd had long been sapped. Travis Head had already crushed the Indian dream. The aura of invincibility that the team wore through their World Cup campaign had been dropped. Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli were visibly distraught and dispirited.
The two greats of Indian cricket had manifested, visualised, and lived for this moment. They’d both individually played their best World Cup but it wasn’t to be. The final hurdle was one hurdle too many. The perfect climax remained elusive. The notoriously coined trophy drought remained steadfast.
How much of it, might you think, has been compensated for after the miraculous heist India pulled off on June 29 in Barbados? Well, not quite if the Indian captain’s own word on the matter is to be treated as final. Ever since that heartbreaking loss in Ahmedabad, Rohit has time and again spoken of the significance of that World Cup and how a T20 substitute instead doesn’t come anywhere close to matching its legacy.
The events from Barbados however might have forced Rohit to be slightly kinder to himself and soften up a little on the intransigence. While T20s are unquestionably an abridged version of the more serious limited-overs format and the scale of achievement must be appraised accordingly, the victory in the Caribbean was still sufficiently special.
That it concluded the T20 journey in India colours for both Rohit and Kohli added layers of emotions to the win. The veteran duo are bona fide legends of the game but there were questions raised on their suitability to play this format any longer; and justifiably so. T20 cricket has undergone a metamorphosis that makes it look unrecognisable from the time Rohit and Kohli naturally made the first two names in the India lineup.
The IPL assembly line has produced modern T20 specimens who have smashed the door down and would’ve long made their India debuts were it not for the tradition that fails to phase out players with legacy status. To their credit though, both Rohit and Kohli realised the nature of the beast this time and finally played T20s the way they’re meant to be.
While Rohit had an outstanding tournament with the bat, Kohli paid the price for this approach as he repeatedly got out cheaply playing high-risk shots early in his game. Low returns never suit a player of Kohli’s repute but he realised the value in not putting a price to his wicket in this format. It required a complete unlearning of the very way he’s built his game but once he’d bought into the team’s vision, he remained all in.
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In fact, the knock Kohli played in the final was a complete antithesis of the philosophy India had adopted in the tournament. In the end, the team’s superior bowling pedigree ensured a victory of wafer-thin margins but had South Africa crossed the line – the way they would have on most days from the position they were in – Kohli’s innings would’ve then rightly been called out for what it was. A fairytale ending however entails incredible amounts of revisionism and the innings shall now instead be written about in tired poetics. Nothing succeeds like success after all.
However, the reason it was vital for this generation of Indian players to win at least one piece of relevant silverware is the shallowness with which the media and commentariat tend to define a team’s greatness. The core of the current Indian team has remained intact for the better part of last ten years and has remained dominant across formats.
Where teams struggle to win a single Test match in Australia, India has gone on to register two series wins down under in last five years. The team has remained consistently competitive in England and South Africa and maintained a home dominance that has few parallels in the history of Test cricket. However, the distinctive footnote with which this Test team is talked about is its failure to win a one-off Test scheduled every two years that’s fancily dubbed as the World Test Championship final.
It’s not too different in ODIs either. India indeed have failed to win the World Cup since they last did in 2011 but have remained a thoroughly dominant force in the format. With ODI cricket slipping down broadcasters’ priority list and fading more quickly from public memory, it’s easy to forge a trophy-based perception that doesn’t paint a very charitable picture for the team. Receiving a thumping at the box-office event in Ahmedabad last year hasn’t helped matters either.
T20s are in fact the only format India has yet to fully master and even a world title doesn’t change that. The inherent randomness of the format is too high for any team to be constantly dominant at it but India for the longest time hasn’t embraced the right template to maximise its resources. While that last bit certainly changed in 2024, it still came down to scripting a ridiculous sleight at the end to actually cross the line.
Bewildering as the final stretch of play was in which South Africa manufactured a way to squander from an unlosable situation, the Indians might argue that slice of luck was long overdue. A thoroughly formidable a team could only have gone so long without its efforts being rewarded in a form the streets recognise. It pretty much showed in the reactions of players when the moment finally arrived.
More than elation it was a sense of relief. Teams usually break into an overdrive of exultation in these moments but the Indians looked visibly liberated at finally losing those infamous tags unfairly attached to them.
And that liberation showed in Rohit Sharma’s angry thumping of the ground. It showed in Virat Kohli’s look of fulfilment. And in Jasprit Bumrah’s slightly boastful smirk. And in Hardik Pandya’s not-so-slightly boastful shrug. This was an extremely belated reward for a pursuit that never dipped in intent or ethic despite excruciating heartbreaks. It didn’t come cheap. In fact it carried a greater chunk of fortune than most winners would care to admit but after a point, it ceases to matter how it came. That it did, is all that does.
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The scenes that followed in Mumbai upon the team’s return might feel futile and performative to some. And the public sentiment is indeed extremely fickle and transactional for the most part. However, athletes too, much as they pretend otherwise, aren’t immune to the petty pleasures of reverence and adulation. And outside Rohit and Kohli, none from the current lot has come close to experiencing this, brilliant however may they have been.
In the end, the hordes of people – having abandoned any sense of concern for their own safety – throwing themselves around at the sight of champions riding along the Marine Drive is going to be the defining memory chronicling this chapter of Indian cricket history. The very palpable exuberance among fans flocking the promenade that day is somewhat rooted in exasperation at having been denied this experience for 14 years despite finding in themselves unrelenting optimism tournament after tournament.
And no knowledge of having done the process right can subsist for the sense of glory that a victory begets. It’d of course have by no means diminished the legacy of this objectively brilliant group of players that has played together for so long. Brian Lara and AB de Villiers after all haven’t won a World Cup. And it’s hard to think of two more celebrated names in all of cricket history.
But now that the collective yearning for a trophy has finally been satisfied, it’d perhaps be a good time to reflect on how incredibly superlative this team has remained over this period in which they’ve supposedly won nothing. It’s not common for a core this strong to come together and have their respective best years coincide. It’s also not common for sporting greatness to be duly recognised during its time.
It takes a weird mix of nostalgia, inflated perception of past, and a growing disenchantment with the present for fans to eventually give teams and players their due. It isn’t unique to Indian cricket though. This behaviour manifests in all fandoms across sports. For a Messi to be finally put in the same league with Maradona, it’s required for the former to somewhat become a thing of past first.
Strange as it seems, many in the current Indian team are closer to end than to beginning. With Rohit and Kohli finally stepping away from T20 internationals, that realisation has got to kick in; that perhaps this core that stayed together for so long has already played their best cricket, that it may never be the same again. And while that may be cue for an avalanche of Instagram edits that elicit cringe, perhaps this group will have earned it.
Had an entire era passed without being capped off by an overriding memory of shared euphoria, this team risked being forgotten; or worse still remembered with extremely unkind names. If nothing else, this World Cup win – even though only in an abridged, bastardised, and somewhat unserious format – has lent the public something real, tangible to remember this juggernaut of a team by.
Does it really matter then what Rohit Sharma believes the real World Cup is?
