For both Virat Kohli and Ravi Shashtri, the T20 World Cup tie against Namibia on Monday will be their last assignment as T20 captain and head coach, respectively. After crashing out of the T20 World Cup indifferently, the Men in Blue will be aiming for the last hurrah.
As soon as New Zealand hit the winning runs against Afghanistan, the Indian cricket team were knocked out of the tournament. Hoping for a miracle, the Indian fans were left were a bitter memory.
The mood in the Indian camp was evident when BCCI‘s official media WhatsApp group had a message for the journalists: “The optional training session in the evening has been cancelled.”
It was understandable dejection as for the first time since the 2012 edition of this event, India had failed to make the knockout stage of an ICC event.
Against Namibia, they are expected to win it big. Very rarely has an Indian team played such an inconsequential game at an ICC event since its last league game in the 1992 World Cup against South Africa after already being out of the race for the semi-finals.
For Kohli, who is all set to even lose his ODI captaincy in the coming days, this wasn’t how he would have liked to end his T20 captaincy stint with the national team having already quit IPL captaincy.
This is the first time since the 2013 Champions Trophy that India has failed to reach the last four.
After winning the Champions trophy in 2013, they ended runners-up in the 2014 T20 World Cup. In the 2015 ODI World Cup, they lost in the semis.
In the 2016 edition of the T20 World Cup, India reached the last four, while they lost to Pakistan in the 2017 final of the 50-over Champions Trophy.
In 2019, their ODI World Cup campaign ended in the semis and the WTC also ended in a final defeat.
It is still not clear whether Kohli will be seen as a one-format captain in Test matches but his performance in the last four ICC tournaments leaves a lot to be desired.
Teams (from)
India: Virat Kohli (captain), Rohit Sharma, KL Rahul, Suryakumar Yadav, Ishan Kishan, Hardik Pandya, Rishabh Pant (wk), Ravindra Jadeja, Ravichandran Ashwin, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Shami, Rahul Chahar, Varun Chakravarthy, Shardul Thakur
Namibia: Namibia: Gerhard Erasmus (c), Stephen Baard, Karl Birkenstock. Michau du Preez, Jan Frylinck, Zane Green, Nicol Lofie-Eaton, Bernard Scholtz, Ben Shikongo, JJ Smit, Ruben Trumpelmann, Michael van Lingen, David Wiese, Craig Williams and Pikky Ya France.
Match Starts; 7:30 pm IST.
