Fulfilled Expectations

It's not easy to be original or profound about what happened yesterday.

I'll settle for saying that India's win was the culmination of a lot of work, by Gary Kirsten and his players, to change them from being a side that tended to crumble under duress to one that was able to withstand the crushing pressure of the expectations of a billion breathless people and ease their way to victory from a difficult position.

Central to this were the coolness, bravado and power of Dhoni - who receives his due praise at greater length elsewhere - and Gambhir, who showed again, despite his ill-judged dismissal, that he will be one of the players to carry the baton on after Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman have gone.

Another will be Virat Kohli, who's rightly winning plaudits for the modesty and timing of his words, but bats with a hard-edged fluency and style which should take him a long way.

I go back a long way with Indian cricket. To the 1979 England tour, in fact, and I remember the 1983 final well. But I haven't lived the years of expectation and frustration like many an Indian has.

This, by Siddhartha Vaidyanathan, sums up what yesterday meant from a young Indian's perspective.

And it's a bloody great piece of writing.