The 1992 Cricket World Cup held in Australia and New Zealand had a number of special additions. Not in the least was the inclusion of cricket heavyweight South Africa. It was also the first world cup to include coloured clothing. Another major addition was the fact that the cup was not divided into pools, and each team had a match against all the other teams. There were 9 teams competing in all. India had a considerably strong team, still bolstered by Kapil Dev and Mohammed Azharuddin. It also had rising star Sachin Tendulkar, who would later become the leading run-scorer in career world cups.
India began badly, losing to England by nine runs. Their second match against Sri Lanka was abandoned due to rain and Australia sneaked home in their third match by only 1 run, despite a strong batting performance from Mohammed Azharuddin (93 off 103 balls). Their first win of the tournament came in the next match against rivals Pakistan, followed by a win against minnows Zimbabwe, the win was by a commanding 55 runs, with Sachin Tendulkar (81 from 77 balls, 8 fours, 1 six) leading the way. India was practically knocked out of the tournament in the next match through its loss to the West Indies by 5 wickets. It went on to lose to New Zealand and South Africa. It only won 2 of its 8 matches, knocking it firmly out of contention for the semi-finals. India ended seventh on the table, above only Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe.
Even the general player performances were at best, lacklustre, Mohammed Azharuddin was the leading batsman, scoring 332 runs in 7 matches without a century included. Sachin Tendulkar scored 283 runs in 7 innings that included 3 fifties. Tendulkar also ended up with a strike rate of 83.98, 6th in the tournament. The highest batting strike rate in the tournament was that of Kapil Dev, who carried a strike rate of 124.810.
The Indian Squad for the 1992 World Cup...
- Ajay Jadeja
- Javagal Srinath
- Kapil Dev
- Kiran More (Wicket keeper)
- Kris Srikkanth
- Manoj Prabhakar
- Mohammed Azharuddin (Captain)
- Praveen Amre
- Ravi Shastri
- Sachin Tendulkar
- Sanjay Manjrekar
- Subroto Banerjee
- Venkatapathy Raju
- Vinod Kambli
Source: Wikipedia
No comments:
Post a Comment