Report
Williamson’s brilliant 85 in vain as New Zealand lose second straight global limited-overs final
Australia 173 for 2 (Marsh 77*, Warner 53) beat New Zealand 172 for 4 (Williamson 85, Hazlewood 3-16) by eight wickets
This has been a tournament of tricky, two-paced pitches, and as a consequence it has recorded the lowest scoring rate of any T20 World Cup. The final, however, came as close to pure T20 as anything we’ve seen over these past few weeks in the UAE. A new record for the fastest fifty in a T20 World Cup final was established, and, in no time, broken, and if Kane Williamson ended up on the losing side and Mitchell Marsh among the winners, the difference lay in what happened around them.
Williamson scored 85 off 48 balls, and New Zealand’s other batters made 78 off 73 between them.
Marsh finished on an unbeaten 77 off 50. Australia’s other batters combined to make 86 off 63. This included a superbly controlled half-century from David Warner, who in this tournament has returned to his best as a T20 opener after an unsettled and unsettling IPL, and a breezy cameo from Glenn Maxwell, to whom fell the honour of playing the winning shot: a reverse-swipe past short third man off Tim Southee.
Australia won by eight wickets, with seven balls to spare, and at long last they were T20 world champions.
Australia weren’t among the favourites when this tournament began, but look down that line-up once more. You can’t have hitters of the calibre of Warner, Aaron Finch, Marsh, Maxwell and Marcus Stoinis and not be a seriously good T20 team for too long. The bowlers played their part too – not least Josh Hazlewood, whose into-the-pitch legcutters enabled him to return figures of 4-0-16-3 in a match with a combined run rate of nearly 8.9 – but this was primarily a triumph of T20’s most vital skill: boundary hitting.
Australia, on the day, were markedly better than New Zealand at this skill, though it certainly helped that they won the final toss of a heavily toss-influenced tournament.
Full report to follow
Karthik Krishnaswamy is a senior sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo
This article was originally published by Espncricinfo.com. Read the original article here.