Well, this was truly an exciting Sunday. India seniors backed their decent bowling performance with some terrific batting from the top order to crush Australia by 6 wickets in the first final of the Commonwealth Bank Tri Series. India juniors disappointed with some poor batting giving in to the pressure from some excellent bowling from the South African pacers. But the script had its thrilling moments. Defending a modest 159 the Indian bowlers matched their counterparts in restricting South Africa to 102/8 in another match decided by the Duckworth Lewis method and eventually winning the Under 19 Cricket World Cup 2008.
Whatever happened in the two finals, India clearly showed that they now play a different kind of cricket. After a long time Sachin Tendulkar opened his bat to some exciting stroke play and left the Australians dumbfounded. Never did he gave the opposition a chance to get on to him and stroked another memorable century on the Kangaroo land. He would be a satisfied man what with getting a century that eluding century in Australia fittingly in the first final to set up the remaining two finals.
Though the junior Indian cricket team disappointed with the batting display there was no sign of any nervousness on the players and they instead looked quite relaxed even with a modest total to defend. A tight bowling with some electric fielding thrown in left the proteas clueless and eventually fell short of 12 runs to hand over the trophy to India. Not to take away any credit the proteas did put on some terrific display of cricket and truly deserved to be in the finals, but as they say only the best team wins and today it was India.
Aala Santhosh Reddy 