This was a giant of an occasion, but a midget of a match. After all the weeks of anticipation, the days of travel as fans journeyed across India and from its diaspora towards the homing beacon this epic bowl had become, and the hours as they filed and then flooded into the ground, in cricket terms it was decided in little more than the blink of an eye, the time it took for Pakistan to crumble.
With almost no Pakistani presence in the stands the game ended up almost as one-sided as the crowd. Mickey Arthur, Pakistan’s team manager, complained that “it didn’t seem like an ICC event to be brutally honest – it seemed like a BCCI event”, but admitted his side “went into our shells a little bit”.
