A tournament with a script
India hosted alone for the first time. The three previous World Cups staged in the country had all been shared, and this one ran across ten venues with the same ten-team round robin that England had used four years earlier. Forty-five group matches, six weeks, and a schedule that appeared to have one ending in mind.
For ten matches India played to it exactly. They were two for three against Australia in Chennai and won by six wickets anyway, Virat Kohli and KL Rahul adding 165. They chased down Pakistan's 191 in Ahmedabad, bowled South Africa out for 83 at Eden Gardens, and took all nine group games. Kohli finished with 765 runs, more than anyone has scored in a single World Cup, and reached his fiftieth one-day hundred in the semi-final at his old home ground in Mumbai, on an evening when Mohammed Shami took 7 for 57.
Around this, other things happened. Afghanistan beat England, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in the space of a fortnight. The Netherlands beat South Africa at Dharamsala. England, the holders, won three of nine and were effectively out by the start of November.
Mumbai, 7 November
Afghanistan made 291 for 5 at the Wankhede and reduced Australia to 91 for 7. What followed was the most improbable innings the competition has staged. Glenn Maxwell, cramping so badly in the heat that he could barely walk between the wickets, let alone run, hit 201 not out from 128 balls. He was flat on the pitch at one point waiting for the physio while Adam Zampa waited at the boundary rope. He and Pat Cummins put on 202 unbroken for the eighth wicket, of which Maxwell scored 179. Australia won by three wickets and went to the semi-finals.
Ahmedabad
Cummins won the toss in front of a stadium built for 130,000 and chose to bowl, which almost nobody had been doing there. India made 240 in their fifty overs. Travis Head, who had missed the group stage with a broken hand, made 137 from 120 balls and Australia were home in 43 overs with six wickets standing. Head was man of the match, as he had been in the World Test Championship final against the same opponents five months earlier. The noise in the ground simply stopped.
Afterwards
It was Australia's sixth World Cup, taken off a side that had won every match it played until the one that counted. India have still not won a global fifty-over title on home soil since 2011. The next edition, in southern Africa in 2027, goes back to fourteen teams, which reopens the door the ICC shut after 2015.