Kanpur's Diwali Gift...

Kanpur was rewarded a treat of Indo-Pak match, it has been 2 years since a cricket match was held here.

Pakistan won the toss and elected to bowl hoping to use the good bowling conditions to restrict India to a moderate total. Pakistan's bowling plans was misaligned by some good looking strokes of
Sachin and Saurav. But this was only after Saurav got a life in the first over when his catch was dropped by the keeper. Saurav looked shaky due to lack of foot work and inability to offer the right defensive stokes to some of Shoaib and Umar's swinging deliveries. Luck favored the opening pair and India took advantage of the misfielding. India lost the Sachin to unorthodox bowling style of Sohail Tanvir and this was quickly followed by Saurav. The Kanpur wicket was not offering the batsmen to play their natural strokes due to dual bounce and pace. This resulted in frustrated moments to batsmen like Gambir, who was not able to get value for his stroke play. India were rotating their strike well during the middle overs and kept their wicket intact. This gave a nice platform for set Yuvraj and Dhoni to take some risks and accelerate the scoring rate. Dhoni and Yuvraj hit big sixers to take India to good defendable score of 294/6 at the end of 50 overs. Highlighting point of Pakistan's bowling was Sohail economical and wicket taking bowling.


Pakistan to counter the asking rate of around 5.88, they send in the hard hitting Afridi and their stylist batsman Salmaan Butt. The gamble with Afridi only paid off for couple of overs and he was sent to the pavilion by a beautiful in swinging delivery of Irfan Pathan. This started the consolidation period for Pakistan, but they kept on loosing wickets, RP Singh deceiving in form Younis Khan a gem of a delivery to remove his off stump. Salmaan Butt played his best innings of this season by scoring century without receiving any support from his team mates at the other end of the crease. India applied pressure using the pace and spin attach. The surprise performer in the spin department was Yuvraj with his off cutters helped India keep Pakistan at bay. At one point Pak need 100 run with 10 overs remaining, this where Pakistan failed to raise the tempo of the game. Dhoni faired decent as a captain, but still has long way to go w.r.t to field placings and learning the tricks of the trade. With this win India lead the series 2-1 against Pak. With 2 games remaining to go this series is open anyone's grab. The man of the match went rightly to Yuvraj for his matching winning knock of 77 and crucial bowling performance.