West Indies Champions Beat India Champions by 6 Wickets — Two Wickets in Three Balls, Then Walton Walks It Home

Three balls. That is how long India Champions' night lasted as a contest of equals. Naman Ojha nicked Fidel Edwards to Chadwick Walton off the second ball of the match. Ambati Rayudu was run out by Sheldon Cottrell off the third, without facing a delivery that counted. Nought for two, and the Sharjah crowd that had come for Yuvraj Singh and Harbhajan Singh had barely found its seat.

It did not get better quickly. Stuart Binny, Yuvraj and Robin Uthappa were gone by the seventh over with 28 on the board, and only an eighth-wicket stand of 38 between Rishi Dhawan and Harbhajan got India to 110 for 8. Walton then played the one innings of substance in the match, 60 from 43, and West Indies Champions won by 6 wickets with 31 balls to spare. They are into the semi-finals. India Champions, winners of the first edition, finish the league with one win from five.

Chris Gayle's decision to bowl was vindicated inside a minute, but the more telling thing was how West Indies kept the squeeze on after the early wickets. Fidel Edwards bowled only seven balls, with Raymon Reifer finishing his second over, and the attack never loosened: Carlos Brathwaite's four overs cost 18, Nikita Miller's two cost nine, and Rayad Emrit, who took Uthappa and Piyush Chawla, went at six an over. India hit two sixes in the whole innings. It was a bowling performance built on line rather than pace.

The chase lost Gayle in the first over, caught by Harbhajan off Dhawal Kulkarni, and for a moment there was a flicker of something. Walton and Lendl Simmons put that out with a 65-run stand for the second wicket. Simmons was content to block; Walton was not. Seven fours and three sixes from 43 balls took West Indies to 108 before he was caught by Kulkarni off Rishi Dhawan, and Reifer finished it with two balls of the 15th over.

Losing two wickets before a run is scored is survivable in T20 cricket if the next three batters are calm. India's were not. Binny was lbw to Reifer, Yuvraj edged a drive at Cottrell to the keeper for 4, and Uthappa, who had hit the only boundaries of the powerplay, holed out to Jermaine Blackwood. Yusuf Pathan, the one man who could have taken the innings deep, took 20 balls over 11. At 61 for 7 in the 13th over, 90 was a stretch.

Credit then to Rishi Dhawan and Harbhajan. Dhawan's 34 from 32 had four fours and the only patience of the top order; Harbhajan's 28 not out had the only big hit of the innings until Dhawan was bowled by Miller in the 19th. Their 38 for the eighth wicket was the biggest stand of the innings by a distance. Kulkarni's two early wickets gave the defence a shape, but the pitch was too good and the target too small. The campaign ends with a win over Australia Champions on the opening night and four defeats since, the narrowest of them by three runs to Bangladesh Champions.

Sharjah had produced 399 runs in the afternoon game between South Africa Champions and England Champions. This was the same surface under lights and it played the same way: true bounce, short boundaries, nothing in it for the bowlers beyond a hint of swing with the new ball. India's total was about their batting rather than the pitch. Walton's strike rate of 140 in the chase, with no real risk, was the honest reading of the conditions.

Walton had already held two catches behind the stumps, Ojha off the second ball of the match and Yuvraj in the fourth over, before he walked out at 2 for 1. He then played the chase on his terms. The stand with Simmons was 65 and Simmons made 22 in all; Walton hit the gaps square on both sides and cleared the rope three times. He was out with three runs to get, which is the only blemish on a night in which he did more than anyone else on either side.

This match didn't have a CricIntel preview — the World Championship of Legends is not part of our prediction model, which is built for current international and franchise T20 cricket. We'll have full analysis for the semi-finals.

West Indies Champions have six points from five games and are through to the semi-finals alongside South Africa Champions, who beat England Champions by nine runs earlier in the day to go four from four. India Champions have completed their league programme with one win from five and cannot reach the last four. The remaining two semi-final places will be settled on October 14: England Champions play Australia Champions, both on four points, in the afternoon, and Bangladesh Champions, on two points, face South Africa in the evening. The semi-finals are on October 16 and the final on October 18, all at Sharjah.