INDIA wins Icc Champions Trophy 2025

 

9th Mar 2025 may not be as big as 25th June 1983 yet a very significant day for Indian Cricket.  ICC Champions Trophy 2025 hosted by Pakistan – but finals played at Dubai is over.  INDIA is the Champion. 

As millions watched, the Dubai sky is lit up – on TV -  Jadeja, Harshit Rana and Arshdeep Singh doing  Gangnam style dance, entertained us as did the dandiya dance with stumps by veterans Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli. Varun Chakravarthy ran to the field even as Gambhir and Kohli were hugging.  It was a match of missed chances, with many catches going abegging and couple of run outs too missed. 

A good four by Ravindra Jadeja who shows his no. 8 in his jersey and says to Harsha, at his entry – he becomes a hero or zero and showers praise on KL Rahul.  The big mighty six hitter Hardik Pandya also praises KL Rahul.  It was a grand team chase !!   Indian   got off to a superb  start with  Rohit Sharma going helter-skelter on a sixer spree and putting up 105-run stand for the opening wicket. Then New Zealand bounced back with three quick wickets with spin doing the damage. Axar Patel and Shreyas Iyer steadied – some lusty blows coupled with discrete batting by Rahul and Pandya took India to the finishing line before Jadeja finished things off.  

 

The match was far more gripping that what the scorecard would suggest.  India 254 for 6 (Rohit 76, Iyer 48, Rahul 34*, Bracewell 2-28) beat New Zealand 251 for 7 (Mitchell 63, Bracewell 53, Kuldeep 2-40, Varun 2-45) by four wickets.  In the end Kiwis defended well though at no point they threatened to close the game in their favour. 

India played four spinners and batted deep and  now hold two of the four ICC trophies, having lost in the final of the other two. In the last three ICC tournaments alone, India have won 22 of their last 23 completed matches. 

Having won the toss and chosing the bat, New Zealand raced away to 69 for 1 in the powerplay but the high-quality spin from India dragged them back. Varun Chakravarthy was among wickets and Kuldeep Yadav spun magic across – then Jadeja bowled admirably and Axar too pitched in.

 

India made a similarly breezy start of 64 for 0, later Kiwis  tested India thoroughly. Their spinners bowled 35 overs for 152 runs and five wickets.  Every batter other than Virat Kohli got a start - scores ranged between Rohit's 76 and Hardik Pandya's run-a-ball 18 - but none of them completed the job. Their incredible depth, prevailed as KL Rahul and Ravindra Jadeja saw them through with one over to spare and four wickets in hand. 

On a day when catches were grassed so frequently, the one taken by Glenn Phillips will stand out for ever.

 

Rohit lost the toss again.  When a coin is tossed up, there are only two possible outcomes – it can be Head or a Tail [crooked possibility of coin standing up removed]. When we toss up, there can be a head or a tail – so the possibility of your calling it right is 50% ?  - if that logic were to be correct, then you should be calling right one out of 2 – that does not happen – some Captains lose tosses in row.   That takes us to the ‘probability theory’   

India has lost 15 tosses consecutively – and that is  the longest streak for any team in men's ODIs. Netherlands' 11 tosses lost between 2011 and 2013 was the previous longest. The probability of losing 15 consecutive tosses is extremely low, calculated as  0.00305% This means that the odds of such a streak occurring are about 1 in 32,768!!

 

As we conclude, Cricket fans feel that every delivery can be hit for a six and every ball can fetch a wicket !! – in an era of IPL where we saw scores of 290+ in 20 overs, no score is good enough.  Remember that the first 3 WC tournaments were 60 overs a side and in earlier days, in England – ODI matches were 55 overs matches. 

Today as NZ were fettered with spin chain, Daryl Mitchell played a responsible yet very slow knock, taking 91 balls for his fifty, the slowest by any New Zealand batter in men's ODIs since Martin Guptill's 95-ball fifty in 2014 against West Indies. Think for a moment and tell whether it was bad – whether the score of 251 would have been possible, if he had got out earlier.  Also tell – how social media would have erupted if Virat Kohli (or worser still) KL Rahul had played such an innings. 

An Indian win in a major ICC tournament – India has won the Champions trophy 2025.  Happy and Indians will now sleep happily

 
Regards – S Sampathkumar
9.3.2025