Pakistan stumble in tight chase amid merry chaos of showpiece

After five years of planning, eight months spent nurturing four pitches which then had to be transported from Australia to the US, six months of construction work on $30m of temporary stadium, including the installation of 34,000 seats and 100 hospitality boxes, a security operation that involved seven agencies, including the police forces of three counties and the FBI, the deployment of snipers, Swat teams, roadblocks, a helicopter, a 50-person video surveillance team, hundreds of buses, and the closure of 1,000 acres of public park, the biggest game ever played in the US was finally ready to get under way.

- Andy Bull

And then it started raining.

Well, they were never going to let the weather stop this fixture. They got the game on, and it was a good one, a giddy set-to. In the end, after five hours of on-and-off play, Pakistan's opening bowlers, Naseem Shah and Shaheen Afridi, needed 18 runs off the last five balls of the final over, bowled by Arshdeep Singh. They managed 11; India won by six.

Pakistan were chasing only 120 and, at 57 for one after 10 overs of the innings, they looked likely to do it. But then Axar Patel got Usman Khan lbw, and Hardik Pandya had Fakhar Zaman was caught behind off a top edge. The listing innings lurched away from them entirely when Mohammad Rizwan was bowled by the first ball of Jasprit Bumrah's second spell. Rizwan had batted through the innings for 31 off 44. And while Pakistan needed only 37 runs from the last 35 balls, the tension was too much, and the bowling too tight, for their lower order of Imad Wasim, Shadab Khan and Iftikhar Ahmed.

India's innings was just as wild.