T20 World Cup: India thrash Scotland by eight wickets, chase down target in 6.3 overs

Team India thrashed Scotland by a margin of eight wickets in the T20 World Cup 2021 encounter between the two sides on Friday. Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul stitched a sublime opening partnership, scoring 70 runs in the opening five overs. This helped the Indian team chase down the target of 86 in just 6.3 overs, pushing their net run rate to the highest in the group. Team India need to ensure a win against Namibia in their final encounter, with Afghanistan defeating New Zealand to sail through to the semi-finals.

Ravindra Jadeja, Mohammed Shami and Jasprit Bumrah combine to restrict Scotland to 85

Spinner Ravindra Jadeja and fast-bowlers Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Shami made their presence felt with a fantastic performance, to help the Indian team bowl out Scotland for just 85. Jadeja accounted for three dismissals. with the two pacers extremely impressive as well. Bumrah picked two wickets, which was followed by Shami accounting for three dismissals as well. Opener George Munsey was the top run-getter for Scotland, accumulating 24 runs off 19 deliveries in an innings comprising of four boundaries and a six.

“I was enjoying bowling on this track today. The odd ball was turning, I was enjoying very much. The first one (Berrington’s wicket) was a special one, whenever you get a batsman out with a turning ball, that’s always special. We were looking to play good brand of cricket. Everybody knows that we had to win with a big margin for us to up our net run-rate, we were looking to play our best game and give our 100% on the field. Everybody’s happy, one more game to go, hopefully we play like this. If we play like this, nobody can beat us. In T20 format, we have to play like this, that is for sure,” said Jadeja as quoted by Cricbuzz.

Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul deliver the goods with the bat

Rohit and Rahul were extremely impressive, accumulating runs at a rapid pace. The latter smashed a half-century in 19 balls, with the knock comprising of six boundaries and three sixes. Rohit had accumulated 30 runs in 16 deliveries. His innings included five fours and a maximum.

“A dominating performance, something that we were striving to do again. Now it will be interesting to see what happens on 7th (November). Don’t want to say a lot about today’s performance, we know what we can do. Also tells you how important the toss can be at this venue. We wanted to get them under 110-120 max, that was the mindset we went in with. The bowlers were excellent, and then KL and Rohit did really well. We spoke about the 8-10 over bracket before the start, didn’t want to really go too hard because if you lose wickets, then an extra 20 balls could cost. We thought that if they play naturally, runs will come quickly,” said Team India skipper Virat Kohli after the win.

“If you look at our practice games, we have been actually batting like this only. Just a couple of aberrations happened, where we just couldn’t got those two successive good overs. Teams bowled well too, and created pressure on us. But we were just two overs of good batting. Jadeja bowled really well, also Shami was quite good. My family is here – that is enough (birthday) celebration for me,” he added.