Indian Men’s cricket team stormed into final in the ICC World Cup after defeating the mighty New Zealand team with 70 runs.
An excellent display of teamwork and sportsmanship, the Indian team popularly known as the ‘Men in Blue’ excelled in every department of Batting, Bowling and fielding to restrict the Kiwis at 327. The New Zealand team lost all of their wickets at regular intervals unable to chase the target of 398 runs set by the Indian batters.
Indian captain Rohit Sharma won the toss and chose to Bat first. Taking full advantage of the pitch, Rohit and his partner Shubhman Gill plundered the Kiwi bowling and gave India a good start. Rohit scored 47 before getting out in an effort to continue hitting sixes, as Kiwi captain Kane Williamson took an awesome catch.
Virat Kohli scored an amazing 117 runs to take the score ahead and created the world record of maximum centuries reaching the milestone of 50 in (ODI) One-Day-Internationals. With this century, Virat surpassed the world record of Indian Cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar of 49 tons. Teaming up with Virat, Shreyas Iyer came out aggressively with his fearless shots hitting sixes and boundaries scoring 105 runs from just 70 deliveries. KL Rahul on 39 and Shubhman Gill on 80 were the unbeaten pair to take the score to a mammoth 397.
New Zealand players began with a slow yet steady start but lost wickets to the Indian pacers Mohammad Shami taking 7 wickets alone. Mohammad Siraj, Kuldeep Yadav and Jasprit Bumrah took one each. From the Kiwi batsmen, Daryl Mitchell(134), Kane Williamson(69) and Glen Philips(41) put up good resistance which fell short in their run chase.
With this 10th consecutive win, Indian cricket team sailed smoothly into the finals to be played on Sunday 19th November at Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad.
