Tense win hands India Under-19 World Cup

KUALA LUMPUR—The Indian bowlers first blew the South African top order away and then, after heavy rains had reduced the match to 25 overs, held their nerves to win their second Under-19 World Cup.
After dismissing India for 159, South Africa batted like they were caught in the headlights, failing to get the ball off the square and losing three wickets in the first 8.4 overs before rain intervened. That meant they were left with a tall order of scoring 99 off 98 balls when play resumed.
Reeza Hendricks and Wayne Parnell batted better after the break, but despite two dropped chances and a missed stumping, they couldn’t hit too many boundaries on the damp outfield. Hendricks and Parnell added 50 for the fifth wicket in 57 balls, but Hendricks fell at a crucial juncture for 35 off 43. South Africa, at that time, required 44 off five overs.
After Ajitesh Argal’s two wickets at the start of the innings, left-arm spinners Ravindra Jadeja and Iqbal Abdullah struck at regular intervals to peg South Africa back. They conceded only 12 off their final overs, leaving Siddharth Kaul 19 runs to defend in the last over. The first ball was paddled by Bradley Barnes past short fine-leg for four, but the next five deliveries yielded only two as South Africa lost by 12 runs. Testing spells of fast bowling by Wayne Parnell and Matthew Arnold, along with electric all-round fielding, by South Africa bowled India for a paltry 159 in the final of Under-19 World Cup at the Kinrara Oval. Right from the first over - a maiden by Parnell - India, with the exception of Tanmay Srivastava, never looked like scoring fluently. The easy scoring options were few, and even those had to get through the electric fence the South African fielders formed inside the circle. Frustrated, Virat Kohli and Srivatsava went to clear them overhead, but both of them found Sybrand Engelbrecht, who pulled off leaping screamers to break the back of India’s middle order. Every time the ball went towards Engelbrecht, he came up with something spectacular casting doubt in the batsmen’s minds. One of those resulted in the run-out of Iqbal Abdullah.
Not that Engelbrecht was the only spectacular fielder; he had Riley Rossouw at cover to make scoring difficult through the off side. Bradley Barnes, the wicketkeeper, continued an impressive World Cup as he showed tremendous mix of great keeping and presence of mind to run Saurabh Tiwary after he and Manish Pandey had threatened to build a middle- and lower-order comeback. Tiwary, batting with Srivastava as his runner, missed a yorker from offbreak bowler Yaseen Vallie, which Barnes collected cleanly and turned towards square leg to find Srivastava backing up, and whipped the bails off. That ended a 37-run fifth-wicket partnership, and India’s last hopes of putting up a total they would feel comfortable to defend.
Barnes stood up to the medium-pace of Roy Adams and Pieter Malan almost throughout, keeping the batsmen in their crease, and made a tough deflection of Pradeep Sangwan’s bat off Adams look easy. With that went any hopes of a late-order flourish, as Sangwan had looked good in scoring 13 off 15 balls.
Earlier it was Srivastava who had prevented a complete disaster as Parnell and Arnold had found the Indian top order a notch below their class, dismissing the openers for next to nothing. After Parnell had won the toss and bravely put India in, it was just as well that the Indian openers, Taruwar Kohli and Shreevats Goswami, were dismissed cheaply, ending their painful existence at the wicket. Taruwar repeated his semi-final dismissal as he top-edged a lame pull from wide outside off stump off Parnell. Goswami edged and prodded his way to six off 25 balls, showing his discomfort against anything not full, and then edged Arnold to second slip, leaving India at 27 for 2 in the 10th over.—Agencies