India at the 2004 Champions Trophy: Results, Squad & Stats

India's 2004 campaign lasted two matches and eight days. They beat Kenya at the Rose Bowl in Southampton on 11 September by 98 runs, waited a week, lost to Pakistan at Edgbaston on 19 September by three wickets, and were out. No Indian side has played fewer games in this competition.

That was not a failure of nerve so much as a consequence of the draw. The 2004 edition put twelve teams into four pools of three and sent only the pool winner to a semi-final, so India's two group games were effectively a knockout with a warm-up attached. Pakistan won the warm-up too — they had beaten Kenya four days before India did — which meant the Edgbaston match on 19 September was a straight elimination fixture with nothing behind it.

India also arrived a batter short. Sachin Tendulkar's tennis elbow had not settled in time, he was ruled out during the NatWest Challenge that preceded the tournament, and Rohan Gavaskar was called into the fourteen in his place. The squad that lost at Edgbaston was therefore the 2003 World Cup runners-up with their highest run-scorer missing and a specialist batter, Rahul Dravid, keeping wicket to free up a place.

Both India matches in full

Stage	Date	Venue	Result	India's innings	Opponent's innings	Player of the match
Pool C	11 Sep 2004	Rose Bowl, Southampton	India won by 98 runs	290/4 (50 ov)	Kenya 192/7 (50 ov)	Sourav Ganguly (India)
Pool C	19 Sep 2004	Edgbaston, Birmingham	Pakistan won by 3 wickets	200 (49.5 ov)	Pakistan 201/7 (49.2 ov)	Yousuf Youhana (Pakistan)

Two matches, one at each end of the run-scoring scale on the same tour: 290 for 4 in Southampton, 200 all out in Birmingham. The gap says more about the two attacks India faced than about India's batting, and it is the reason the campaign ended when it did.

Pool C, and the arithmetic of a three-team group

Team	Played	Won	Lost	Points
Pakistan	2	2	0	4
India	2	1	1	2
Kenya	2	0	2	0

Only Pakistan advanced. In a pool of three where the winner takes everything, a side gets one bad afternoon and no way to recover from it, and the format was criticised at the time for exactly that. Four of the ten Test nations went home having played two matches each. The ICC dropped the structure after this edition and settled on eight teams in two groups of four for 2009, which guaranteed three matches to everyone.

The scheduling drew as much complaint as the format. The tournament ran from 10 to 25 September, after the English domestic season had finished, in short daylight and unreliable weather; three of the twelve pool matches spilled into reserve days. India's own two games were not affected by rain, but they were played in conditions that had far more to do with early autumn in England than with anything the side met at home.

Southampton: 290 for 4, and a captain's innings

Sourav Ganguly made 90 from 124 balls and VVS Laxman 79 from 99, and between them they took India to 290 for 4 from their fifty overs. It was a captain's innings in the plainest sense: Ganguly batted through the middle of the innings, did not try to force the pace early against a disciplined Kenyan seam attack, and left the acceleration to the last ten overs.

Kenya were never in the chase. Morris Ouma made 49, nobody else got past that, and they finished on 192 for 7 without ever threatening the required rate. Harbhajan Singh was the pick of the bowlers with 3 for 33, working the middle overs on a surface that gave him some grip. Ganguly took the player-of-the-match award.

The 98-run margin was comfortable and it flattered India a little. Kenya batted out their overs rather than collapsing, so the win came from a big first-innings total rather than from a dominant bowling performance, and India would need the bowling eight days later.

Edgbaston: 200, and Youhana unbeaten

Batting first at Edgbaston, India were bowled out for 200 in the last over of their innings. Dravid made 67 and was the only batter to settle. Rana Naved-ul-Hasan took four wickets, bowling full and straight with a ball that moved off the seam, and India lost their last wickets trying to reach a defensible score rather than a winning one.

Pakistan's chase was slow and never quite safe. They lost seven wickets and needed 49.2 overs to get home, which in a match of that size counts as close. What kept them in it was Yousuf Youhana — he took the name Mohammad Yousuf the following year — who made 81 not out and refused to be dismissed while wickets fell around him. He was named player of the match, and Pakistan went through with four balls to spare.

For India this was another significant one-day loss to Pakistan in a year that had otherwise gone their way against them, since the same summer had followed India's first Test and one-day series wins on Pakistani soil. The fixture's full ledger sits on the India versus Pakistan ODI record page. Pakistan's reward was a semi-final at the Rose Bowl, where West Indies bowled them out for 131 and won by seven wickets.

The fourteen Ganguly took to England

Player	Role in the squad
Sourav Ganguly	Captain, left-hand batter
Virender Sehwag	Opening batter
Rahul Dravid	Batter, kept wicket in this tournament
VVS Laxman	Batter
Yuvraj Singh	Batter
Mohammad Kaif	Batter
Rohan Gavaskar	Batter, called up for Tendulkar
Dinesh Karthik	Wicketkeeper
Ajit Agarkar	Seam-bowling allrounder
Irfan Pathan	Left-arm seam
Lakshmipathy Balaji	Seam
Ashish Nehra	Left-arm seam
Anil Kumble	Leg spin
Harbhajan Singh	Off spin

The interesting choice is Dravid with the gloves. India had Dinesh Karthik in the squad as a specialist keeper, and MS Dhoni was still months away from a first cap, so Dravid's keeping bought an extra batter or an extra bowler depending on how the eleven was picked. He kept in both matches and made India's highest score in the one that mattered.

The seam group — Irfan Pathan, Lakshmipathy Balaji, Ashish Nehra and Ajit Agarkar — was the young unit that had come through the 2003 World Cup and the Pakistan tour. Pathan was nineteen, Balaji twenty-two. Against Pakistan they conceded 201 in 49.2 overs, which was not the problem; India's 200 was.

The tournament India left behind

West Indies won it, and won it in a way nobody had scripted. Chasing 218 at The Oval on 25 September, they were 147 for 8 with the light going before Courtney Browne and Ian Bradshaw put on an unbroken 71 to beat England by two wickets with seven balls left. Marcus Trescothick's 104 was the innings of the final, and Trescothick finished as the tournament's leading run-scorer with 261; Andrew Flintoff took the most wickets, nine. Ramnaresh Sarwan was player of the tournament.

It was the West Indies' first global one-day title since the 1979 World Cup, and it remains their last major fifty-over trophy. England lost a second home final and were still waiting for a first global one-day title, which arrived at Lord's fifteen years later. The full edition record, including the pools India were not in, is on the 2004 Champions Trophy page, with the competition's whole history on the Champions Trophy hub.

Reading the 2004 campaign

The result reads worse than the cricket. India lost one match in England, by three wickets, and that was the entire margin between a semi-final and a flight home. Set it beside the 2002 edition, where India went through the tournament unbeaten and finished as joint holders after two washed-out finals: the difference in performance between those two campaigns is far smaller than the difference in outcome.

It was also the last Champions Trophy of the Ganguly captaincy. He led India in the 2003 World Cup final and in this tournament; by the 2006 edition, staged in India, Dravid was captain and Ganguly was out of the side. That 2006 campaign won one more match and got no further.

And it marked the point at which India's one-day cricket stopped being built around the 2003 group. Of the fourteen who travelled, Ganguly, Laxman, Kumble, Agarkar and Nehra were all gone from the first-choice one-day side within a few years, and the replacements were the players who won the 2007 World Twenty20. That turnover is traced on the India ODI cricket history page. India's fuller relationship with this trophy, from Nairobi in 2000 through to the title runs of the 2010s and 2020s, is set out on the India at the Champions Trophy page, and the wider game on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Both scorecards — dates, venues, totals, overs, margins and player-of-the-match awards — are taken from the published record of the 2004 ICC Champions Trophy and cross-checked against the ICC tournament archive. The Pool C table follows the official standings at the close of the pool stage.

Named individual figures come from those two scorecards: Ganguly's 90 from 124 balls, Laxman's 79 from 99, Harbhajan Singh's 3 for 33, Ouma's 49, Dravid's 67, Naved-ul-Hasan's four wickets and Youhana's 81 not out. The fourteen-man squad and Rohan Gavaskar's call-up in place of Tendulkar follow the squad announcement and the contemporary reporting of Tendulkar's withdrawal from the tournament.

Where this page describes how a match felt — Pakistan's chase never being safe, Kenya batting out their overs — that is a reading of the scorecards and of match reports rather than a computed measure, since no ball-by-ball record exists for these two games. Trescothick's 261 runs and Flintoff's nine wickets are the edition's published leading aggregates. Verified in August 2026.