India, Pakistan and a bonkers final over: How Kohli pulled off victory in performance for the ages

Of all the sights and sounds of the night when it seemed all of India and Pakistan had found their way into the tiers of the MCG stands, none matched the sheer chaos and confusion of Mohammed Nawaz’s final over.

Two wickets, a no-ball, two wides, a bowled off a no-ball that went for three byes, a vital six and then a closing boundary. The over encapsulated the mess and noise of the all-too-rare meetings between India and Pakistan on the cricket field – for now reserved only for world and Asia cups.

The novelty of that occasion alone helped sell out the MCG, as families trekked from across Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and the world to be there. Notably, trains and trams were packed with cricket lovers from the capital’s outer suburban ring. There will be corners of Tarneit, Melton, Caroline Springs and other such locals with an extra spring in their steps this week.

Beyond the MCG crowd – which surpassed the 1992 50-over World Cup final as the biggest for a neutral event in Australia – the game’s global broadcast audience was massive. And critically for the game’s future, it may have been the most streamed game of cricket yet. In India alone, more than 16 million watched via Disney’s HotStar.

But how did it get to that point? Why, on a night when pace ruled the roost, did Babar Azam have to resort to spin for the final over? How was Nawaz defending 16, when minutes before it had looked like he might have as many as 30 runs in the bank? And when did Virat Kohli turn a battling, halting stay into the best performance of his Twenty20 career?

Virat Kohli steered India home to an unlikely victory at the MCG.Credit:Getty Images

Absorbing the new ball

In each innings, a lively MCG pitch made the early overs fiendishly difficult for batters, in contrast to the agreeable conditions that had allowed Finn Allen to crunch Australia at the SCG on Saturday night.

Where Pakistan declined to 2-15 after four overs, India slipped still further, as far as 4-31 in the seventh. That left Kohli and the all-rounder Hardik Pandya to rebuild both technically and mentally.

And where most thought the Indian pair were letting things slip out of control, Kohli later explained that he has long known how to use that initial time to size up a task, let conditions ease, and figure out how best to clear the boundary later on. It’s basically Twenty20’s answer to Muhammed Ali’s “rope-a-dope” against George Foreman in Zaire.

“I need to be there at the end, that’s a simple stat,” Kohli said later. “Look, I love these situations. I love having a score on the board because it allows you to kind of understand the conditions, understand the dimensions of the ground, understand the bowling attack, and then know exactly what to do at what stage.

Virat Kohli hits a six off a no-ball in the final over.Credit:Nine

“A lot of people talk about pressure while chasing. For me, it’s clarity. You know exactly what you have on the board, and you just need to get it. So it’s a difference of perspective, which has always helped me. And I like these challenges, I take a lot of pride in them. These are the kinds of games that you play cricket for. After 14-15 years, you need challenges like this to kind of wake you up once again and be like, you know, let’s go again.”

The exception to these overs of contemplation was the third bowled by Nawaz and the 11th of the innings. Pandya clumped two sixes and Kohli one, two of these sent flying into the heaving crowd on the shorter straight boundary. It was an over that, beyond going for 20 runs, also allowed Kohli and Pandya to set up a conundrum for Pakistan: Nawaz still had to bowl one more over.

Looking straight ahead

It’s a truism of cricket at the MCG that the shorter straight boundaries are more accessible for hitting than those square of the wicket that seem made for catches in the deep outfield. Kohli and Pandya’s exploratory batting featured the running of plenty of twos to those square expanses, as Pakistan’s fielders hung back on the boundary in hope for catches that never came.

Virat Kohli swings for the fences at the MCG.Credit:Getty Images

When the runs and balls equation had finally lurched out to 48 from the final three overs, Kohli was able to manufacture boundaries from Shaheen Afridi to midwicket, cover and over short fine leg. But when it got to 28 required off eight balls, with the speedy Haris Rauf needing just two more tight balls to complete an exemplary spell, Kohli was left with no other option but to figure a way of going straight.

“I think when Shaheen bowled from the pavilion end, that’s when I spoke to Hardik that we need to take him down,” Kohli said. “And then the conversation was simple. He said Nawaz has to bowl one over. So I told him if I can take Haris down then they will panic because he was their prime bowler. So I was kind of pumping myself up to hit two sixes when we needed 28 off eight and that became 16 off six.

“It’s just instinctively, I saw the ball and I told myself, ‘just stay still’. The one at long-on was unexpected. It was a back-of-a-length slower ball. And the next one, I just swung my bat through the line of the ball and it flew over fine leg.”

The first of those sixes will live long in the memory. It summed up Kohli’s standing as not just a great cricketer but an athlete of global gifts to rank with the likes of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic – clear eyes, tungsten wrists and a flashing blade sent Haris’ off-speed delivery soaring back over his head.

There was, in fact, something more of the tennis stroke to the shot because Kohli, reasoning that there was already pace on the ball from the 145kph Haris, had called for a lighter bat.

“When the situation was such that you had to hit the big ones, I changed my bat, I was playing with a lighter bat because all three of them were bowling 145kph-plus. I was like, just swing through line on the ball. And I kept believing in myself,” he said.

“Those two shots to Haris Rauf was the time I was just talking to myself – ‘you have to hit those sixes here, otherwise there’s no chance, we’re gonna win this game’. And I told Hardik if we can go up to him [Rauf], and if he goes for a big over, they will panic big time. And that’s exactly what happened.”

The second was a simpler affair, but undoubtedly the product of the previous shot’s audacity. Haris felt he could not afford to give Kohli any room whatsoever to swing like that, duly opening up the chance for India’s No.3 to move his weight towards the off side and swing for the other straight boundary behind him. Tumult followed in the stands, and Nawaz was left with his unenviable task.

‘We kept watching their body language’

Pakistan, then, had gone from looking likely winners to having their most vulnerable bowler coming on to defend 16 against two set and predatory batters in Kohli and Pandya. In a nod to the circumstances, Mohammed Rizwan stood back rather than up to the stumps for Nawaz, a former medium-pacer converted to spin.

Next, of course, there was a wicket, as Pandya skied his attempt to hit those distant, aforementioned square boundaries. Dinesh Karthik did the right thing by finding a single first ball, and that left Nawaz facing Kohli.

A batter this legendary, in a scenario he had not only won through on multiple occasions but had played the giant hand in conjuring here? Little wonder, perhaps, that Nawaz could not hold his skills together. Both batter and bowler knew the pressure ratio had flipped from hunter to hunted.

“We kept watching their body language,” Kohli said. “And we knew that it’s going to turn at some stage. It turned quite late, to be honest. I’d have liked to do it earlier, but then we could not have afforded any more wickets at that stage.

“To be honest, when I was 12 off 21, I was like, ‘I’m really messing this game up, not pulling the ball in the gaps’. But then when you have experience then you understand the value of batting deep. That’s always been my role playing for India, to bat 16-17 overs. Because I know that I can do a lot of the power-hitting towards the latter half of the innings. And that’s always been my strength.

“I can strike at 250-300 as well, when I become really confident and there’s only one guy under pressure and that’s the bowler. So I always try to get to that situation, where I’m not feeling any pressure. I’m not saying I didn’t feel any pressure today, but then you give us a platform to then say you know what, it’s their game to lose now.”

Incredibly, the no-ball, the wides and the byes off the free hit turned 13 off three to two off two, then after Karthik’s exit, one off one. R Ashwin’s closing boundary was a moment of triumph for India, but it seemed almost too easy next to some of the pyrotechnics that had preceded it. Kohli had created a cauldron into which Pakistan’s bowlers were left to boil. Nawaz most of all.

For six years, Kohli’s 82 off 51 to knock Australia out of the 2016 Twenty20 World Cup on Indian soil had been seen as his definitive contribution to the format. But in front of 90,293 spectators at the MCG, he was happy to admit that the former masterpiece had been trumped.

“I have always said Mohali was my best innings, against Australia,” he said. “Today I got 82 off 53. So they are exactly the same innings, but I think today I will count this one higher because of the magnitude of the game and what the situation was.”

That was how Australia’s biggest sporting stage was afforded a virtuoso performance by one of sport’s most watchable performers.

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