The relief was writ large on the face of Axar Patel when his final delivery of the match went for a dot ball. India’s raucous fans celebrated, but they knew that Japanese batter Alexander Shirai-Patmore and his teammates had just come perilously close to inflicting one of the biggest upsets in cricket history.
Japan, ranked 41st in the world, had taken the T20 world champions to the final ball in a brief but incident-packed meeting last week between the sport’s minnows and giants that hours earlier had looked like falling victim to Typhoon Dujuan.
