Hope Bats Through the Night: West Indies Chase 352 at Mullanpur and Take Something Home

Dead rubbers are supposed to be gentle things. The series is settled, the trophy is already in somebody's kit bag, and everyone is allowed to try something new without consequence. Nobody seems to have told Shai Hope. India had won in Thiruvananthapuram and in Guwahati, both times by eight wickets, both times with West Indies' bowlers left looking for somewhere to stand. At Mullanpur, India batted first, made 351 for 7, and for most of the evening it looked like the shape of the series would hold.

It did not. India 351 for 7. West Indies 352 for 5 in 48.2 overs. Hope opened the batting, was still there at the end, and made 162 not out from 143 balls with 17 fours and three sixes. It was the highest successful chase in West Indies' ODI history, and Hope's 162 is the highest score by a West Indies man in a winning ODI chase, past Brian Lara's 153 against Pakistan in Sharjah in 1993. India take the three-match series 2-1. Hope was Player of the Match; Shubman Gill, with 334 runs, was Player of the Series. Both awards were earned, and only one of them came from this game.

A chase of 352 is not one innings; it is four or five small ones, each asked to hand over to the next without dropping anything. West Indies managed that almost perfectly. John Campbell, a centurion in Guwahati, went for 10 from 7 balls, bowled with the score on 41 in the fifth over. Then Amir Jangoo joined his captain and they added 109 before Jangoo was run out for 67 from 56 balls in the 21st over. Add his 58 not out in the first ODI and his 114 in the second and Jangoo finishes the series with 239 runs. West Indies have found a batter.

What followed was quietly well managed. Sherfane Rutherford made 24 from 25 and helped add 56 for the third wicket. Keemo Paul, who had already taken two wickets, then made 44 from 35 balls in a stand of 65, and when he was caught at 271 for 4 in the 41st over, the target was down to 81. Matthew Forde went at 290 in the 44th, and here the arithmetic turned unkind: 62 needed from 39 balls, with Gudakesh Motie, a left-arm spinner, walking out to bat at No. 7.

They needed only 29 of those 39 balls. Motie made 19 not out from 14, with a six among his three boundaries, and Hope did the rest. It is worth pausing on that unbroken 62, because it is the part of the evening that will be remembered in the Caribbean. In Thiruvananthapuram, West Indies were 135 for 0 and lost by eight wickets. Here, with the game in the balance and the tail exposed, nobody blinked.

India's innings began like a mistake. Gill was caught for 1 at 3 for 1 in the third over, and off the very next ball Virat Kohli was bowled first ball. Four for 2 after 2.4 overs; 28 for 2 at the end of the powerplay. The two men who had scored 501 runs between them in the first two matches had 1 between them here.

Rohit Sharma and Ruturaj Gaikwad repaired it the old-fashioned way. Rohit reached fifty from 58 balls and went on to 92 from 85, with ten fours and three sixes, before he was caught at 141 in the 25th over, eight short of what would have been a second hundred in two matches. Gaikwad's 57 from 69 was an unusual innings — one four and four sixes — and the stand of 137 put India back in charge. When Gaikwad went at 160 for 4 in the 29th over, India were scoring at a shade over five and a half an over and needed someone to change gear.

KL Rahul changed it. He reached fifty from 41 balls and his hundred from 80, and arithmetic tells you he made 29 from the seven balls after that. He finished on 129 not out from 87, with ten fours and six sixes. Naman Dhir made 30 from 21 and Anshul Kamboj hit two sixes in his 17 from 9 before he was run out. India were 160 for 4 after 28.5 overs and made 191 from the remaining 21.1. India brought up 300 at 46.4 overs and took 51 more from the last 20 balls.

The ball was where it went wrong. Kamboj, brought into the squad when Prasidh Krishna was ruled out, went for 82 in nine wicketless overs. Nitish Kumar Reddy's 6.5 overs cost 50. Kuldeep Yadav's 10 overs for 62 and Siraj's 8 for 52 were the tightest of the lot, and Naman Dhir's part-time spell of 5.2-0-33-1 was the most economical of all. One of West Indies' five wickets was a run-out. India conceded 19 extras to West Indies' 8. Over three matches, India's bowlers were asked to defend once, and this is what it looked like.

We will not pretend to have knelt on the pitch. The scorecard says 703 runs in 98.2 overs for the loss of 12 wickets, two of them run-outs. It says 22 sixes were struck, 17 of them by India. It says the side batting second won with 10 balls to spare. Of the twelve bowlers used, only Matthew Forde (4.33 an over) went at under six; five went at seven or more.

Seales deserves the mention. Ten overs, 3 for 62, in an innings of 351. West Indies' over-rate also cost them a fielder inside the circle from the 48th over, and India took 51 from the last 20 balls.

He made 12 in Thiruvananthapuram and 104 in Guwahati, and both times West Indies lost by eight wickets. That is the weight he carried to the crease at Mullanpur: a captain whose runs had not been enough, opening the batting with 352 in front of him and the series already gone.

What he made was 162 not out from 143 balls, at a strike rate a little over 113. There was nothing frantic about it. He let Jangoo and Paul take the eye at the other end, ran hard, picked his boundaries, and kept the required rate within reach rather than chasing it down. It was an innings that understood its own job — to be there at the end — and then did it. There is a particular kind of courage in a long chase, the courage not to hurry, and Hope had it in plenty.

His series ends on 278 runs. Gill's is 334, and Gill has the trophy. But the last word of the ODI leg belongs to a man in maroon.

We got the headline wrong. Our preview, written before the second ODI was played, named India as favourites regardless of the series position and called the match "India's to lose, West Indies' to prove". India lost it, and West Indies proved a good deal.

Our players to watch split. We picked Shubman Gill for India and spoke of a homecoming hundred in Punjab; he made 1. We picked Amir Jangoo for West Indies as a batter who could change the shape of an innings, and his 67 from 56 in a 109-run stand did exactly that. We also suggested Gudakesh Motie could be West Indies' trump card. We meant his left-arm spin, which went for 67 in ten overs; it turned out to be his batting, 19 not out at the finish.

On conditions, we said Mullanpur was the kind of ground where 300 is a target rather than a fantasy, and both sides went past 350, which makes us right in the way a weather forecaster is right when he says it might rain and it floods. We also said dew could give the side batting second a quiet advantage; the side batting second did win, but nothing in the scorecard lets us say why, so we will not claim it.

India take the ODI series 2-1, and the T20I leg begins at the Ekana Cricket Stadium in Lucknow on October 6, with Shreyas Iyer taking over the T20I captaincy from Gill. The ODI side leaves with its batting in rude health — ten hundreds were made across the three matches, five of them by Indians — and a bowling question that this match asked rather loudly. Conceding 405 and then failing to defend 351 is not a pattern any side wants to carry towards a World Cup.

West Indies leave the ODIs with a defeat on the scoreline and something better in the dressing room. They have scored 295, 405 and 352 in three matches against India in India; they have found Jangoo; and in Mullanpur they finally finished the job. Three days ago, the question was whether this side could win from a position of strength. They have answered it from a position of 62 needed off 39.