DUBAI: India on Monday hammered Namibia by nine wickets to give Virat Kohli a winning farewell in his last match as Twenty20 captain and finish their disappointing World Cup campaign on a high.
Chasing a moderate target of 133, the Men in Blue rode on a 86-run opening stand between Rohit Sharma, who hit 56, and KL Rahul, who made an unbeaten 54, to reach their target. Indian spinners Ravindra Jadeja and Ravichandran Ashwin took three wickets each to set up the victory after they kept Namibia to 132 for eight.
David Wiese scored 26 off 25 balls and lifted Namibia from a precarious 94-7 to a respectable total. Rohit, who remains the frontrunner to take over the T20 duties from Kohli, hit his second half-century of the competition.
Rohit finally fell to Jan Frylinck’s left-arm medium pace but only after he smashed seven fours and two sixes in his 37-ball knock. Rahul kept up the pace to make his third consecutive fifty and struck the winning boundary. Suryakumar Yadav hit an unbeaten 25 off 19 balls.
India, who bowed out of the tournament on Sunday, finished the tournament with three wins from five Super 12 matches but missed out on the semi-finals. “I know we have not gone far in this World Cup, but we have had some good results in T20 and enjoyed playing together,” said Kohli.
“It’s a game of margins, T20 cricket. You talk about two overs of cricket with intent in the first two games and things could have been different,” he said, adding, “We were not brave enough, as I said. We are not a team that will give (the) excuse of tosses.”
New Zealand beat Afghanistan on Sunday to eliminate India from the competition and join Pakistan as the teams into the final four from Group 2. Namibia signed off with a single win in their first appearance in the Super 12 stage of the T20 World Cup.
“Only once we go back we’ll be able to realise we played an awesome level of cricket,” said Namibia captain Gerhard Erasmus. “We can take a lot of positives individually and as a team we’ll take this experience as a whole,” he added.
