Big picture: The two best spin-bowling units
Everybody knows how this is going to play out.
Perhaps New Zealand are here to balance the scales a bit. Their spinners have been almost as good as India’s, picking up 17 wickets, and they’ve had the better of India in four of the last eight ICC tournaments. They have a member of the current Fab Four in good form and a contender for the next one coming off a hundred. Eight of the XI they’ve been using at this Champions Trophy were also part of the Test side that beat India in India 3-0. They really should stop meeting like this. But lucky for us, and maybe the ICC too, they won’t.
Form guide: India on a roll
India: WWWWW (last five matches, most recent first)
New Zealand: WLWWW
In the spotlight: Kane Williamson and Shubman Gill
Team news: Is Henry fit to play?
India have beaten New Zealand in Dubai already and that’s how they realised their best combination for those conditions, bringing in Varun and gaining another point-of-difference bowler through the middle overs. It’s unlikely they’ll want to tinker with that.
India (probable): 1 Rohit Sharma (capt), 2 Shubman Gill, 3 Virat Kohli, 4 Shreyas Iyer, 5 Axar Patel, 6 KL Rahul (wk), 7 Hardik Pandya, 8 Ravindra Jadeja, 9 Kuldeep Yadav, 10 Mohammed Shami, 11 Varun Chakravarthy
New Zealand (probable): 1 Will Young, 2 Rachin Ravindra, 3 Kane Williamson, 4 Daryl Mitchell, 5 Tom Latham (wk), 6 Glenn Phillips, 7 Michael Bracewell, 8 Mitchell Santner (capt), 9 Kyle Jamieson, 10 Matt Henry/Jacob Duffy/Nathan Smith, 11 Will O’Rourke
Pitch and conditions: Win toss, bat first, win match?
A fresh pitch was offered to the two teams in the semi-final in Dubai and though it was somewhat better for batting, it wasn’t by any means helpful. Both teams will be focused on taking pace off the ball and might value setting a total, not just because it is a knock-out game, but because in the absence of dew, run-scoring will get harder as the pitch wears and tears.
Stats and trivia: Kohli chasing Gayle
- Henry has ten wickets at an average of 16.70 at this Champions Trophy. Five of those wickets came in the group match against India in Dubai
- India have made the knockout stages in 12 of the last 14 ICC events and won three. New Zealand have made eight and won one
- Virat Kohli is 45 runs away from beating Chris Gayle’s record as the highest run-getter in the Champions Trophy
- New Zealand’s spinners took seven wickets in the semi-final against South Africa, their joint-highest tally in a game of 50-over cricket. But they weren’t too effective in the group game they played against India, picking up two wickets for 128 runs at 5.1 runs per over
Quotes
“Yeah, regardless of whether it’s my last or not, that’d be pretty nice, wouldn’t it?”
Kane Williamson loves to keep people guessing about his career. This was his answer to a question about how it’d feel to win potentially his last Champions Trophy match.
“There’s a lot of debate about the undue advantage and all that. What undue advantage? We haven’t practised here [Dubai stadium] even for one day. We’re practising at the [adjacent] ICC academy. And the conditions there and here are 180 degrees different. Some people are just perpetual cribbers, man.”
India coach Gautam Gambhir comes out all guns blazing.
Alagappan Muthu is a sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo
