India at the 2006 Champions Trophy: Results, Squad & Stats

India staged the 2006 Champions Trophy across Mohali, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Mumbai, and were eliminated on 29 October with a week of the tournament still to run. Rahul Dravid's side beat England at Jaipur, lost to West Indies at Ahmedabad with two balls left, and then lost the must-win match to Australia at Mohali. No Asian team reached the semi-finals of a tournament held in Asia — the first time that had happened at a major ICC event since the inaugural World Cup of 1975.

The bare numbers are unkind and slightly misleading. India finished third in Group A on two points, level with England, but with a net run rate of 0.482 that was the second best in the group — better than the 0.009 that carried West Indies through in second place. Points, not run rate, decided it, and India lost the two matches that would have supplied the points.

The wider context was a bad twelve months of one-day cricket. India had failed to reach the final of the DLF Cup triangular in Kuala Lumpur in September, a month before this tournament began, and Greg Chappell's coaching tenure was already the subject of open argument. A home ICC event was the obvious place to settle that argument, and it did not get settled in India's favour.

Group A, match by match

Date	Venue	Opponent	Batting first	Chasing	Result
15 Oct 2006	Sawai Mansingh Stadium, Jaipur	England	England 125 (37 ov)	India 126/6 (29.3 ov)	India won by 4 wickets
26 Oct 2006	Sardar Patel Stadium, Ahmedabad	West Indies	India 223/9 (50 ov)	West Indies 224/7 (49.4 ov)	West Indies won by 3 wickets
29 Oct 2006	PCA Stadium, Mohali	Australia	India 249/8 (50 ov)	Australia 252/4 (45.4 ov)	Australia won by 6 wickets

India bowled first once and won; batted first twice and lost both. Across the tournament as a whole, captains who had the choice generally preferred to field, and the two India defeats are a straightforward illustration of why.

Where the two points went

Team	Played	Won	Lost	Points	Net run rate
Australia	3	2	1	4	0.529
West Indies	3	2	1	4	0.009
India	3	1	2	2	0.482
England	3	1	2	2	-1.044

Australia and West Indies went through. The oddity is that West Indies did so having beaten Australia by ten runs at the Brabourne Stadium — the tournament's headline upset — and having scraped past India in the last over at Ahmedabad, while losing heavily enough elsewhere to end with a net run rate barely above zero. India's two defeats were both by margins that left their run rate healthy. A group of four in which each side plays three matches gives no credit for that.

Jaipur: England 27 for 4, and a target of 126

The relaid pitch at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium behaved nothing like an Indian October surface. Irfan Pathan and Munaf Patel had England 27 for 4 with the new ball, and England never recovered: Paul Collingwood's 38 was the only score above thirty and they were bowled out for 125 in 37 overs. Munaf Patel took 3 for 18 and was named player of the match; Ramesh Powar also took three.

India's chase of 126 was not the formality it should have been. They lost six wickets getting there and needed 29.3 overs, with Sachin Tendulkar's 35 from 41 balls the top score and Yuvraj Singh making 27. The same movement that had wrecked England was still in the pitch, and on a day when both sides found batting difficult India were simply the side with fewer runs to find.

That win, on 15 October, was India's only one of the tournament, and the only Champions Trophy match India have won as hosts — the competition has not returned to India since.

Ahmedabad: 223, and West Indies with two balls to spare

Eleven days later at the Sardar Patel Stadium, India batted first and made 223 for 9. MS Dhoni's 51 from 65 balls was the highest score and Dravid made 49; Ian Bradshaw took three wickets, bowling into the pitch and taking pace off the ball as the innings wore on. A total in the low 220s under lights in Ahmedabad was defensible rather than comfortable.

West Indies got home in 49.4 overs, losing seven wickets. Shivnarine Chanderpaul made 51 and was named player of the match, batting for long stretches without visible urgency and then finding the two balls that mattered. The margin — three wickets, two balls — is the whole story of India's tournament: they were never outclassed and they twice failed to close a game out. The longer ledger between the sides is on the India versus West Indies ODI record page.

Mohali: 249 on the board, and Martyn unbeaten

India needed to win at the PCA Stadium on 29 October and made 249 for 8, their best batting effort of the three matches. Virender Sehwag made 65 from 90 balls and Dravid 52; Glenn McGrath conceded 34 in his ten overs and took two wickets, which on a used surface against that batting order was the spell that set the target.

Australia chased 252 in 45.4 overs for the loss of four wickets. Damien Martyn made 73 not out and took the player-of-the-match award, playing the innings of a batter who had decided the pitch was slower than it looked and that placement would beat power. India's bowlers could not force a wicket in the middle overs, Australia never needed to take a risk, and the chase finished with more than four overs unused.

Australia went on to win the tournament, beating West Indies by eight wickets on the Duckworth-Lewis method in a rain-shortened final at the Brabourne Stadium on 5 November. It was their first Champions Trophy at the fifth attempt. The fixture history between India and Australia in this format is on the India versus Australia ODI record page, and the edition as a whole on the 2006 Champions Trophy page.

The fourteen, and the Sreesanth call-up

Player	Role in the squad
Rahul Dravid	Captain, batter
Virender Sehwag	Opening batter
Sachin Tendulkar	Batter
Yuvraj Singh	Batter
Mohammad Kaif	Batter
Suresh Raina	Batter
Dinesh Mongia	Batter, left-arm spin
MS Dhoni	Wicketkeeper, batter
Irfan Pathan	Left-arm seam, allrounder
Ajit Agarkar	Seam
Munaf Patel	Seam
RP Singh	Left-arm seam
Ramesh Powar	Off spin
Harbhajan Singh	Off spin

Ajit Agarkar was injured before the last match and S Sreesanth was added to the squad. The shape of the fourteen is worth noting: three specialist spinners' worth of overs between Powar, Harbhajan Singh and Mongia, but the wickets that won the Jaipur match came from seam, and the conditions across the tournament rewarded seam almost everywhere. India had picked for the country they knew rather than for the surfaces they got.

Suresh Raina was nineteen and Dhoni had been an international for under two years. Both would be in the side that won the World Twenty20 nine months later.

Bowler-friendly pitches in a batting country

The 2006 edition produced conditions almost nobody had forecast. The surfaces held moisture, seamed for longer than expected and slowed down as the ball aged. West Indies were bowled out for 80 by Sri Lanka; Pakistan were dismissed for 89 by South Africa. Both were, at the time, among the smallest totals any of the leading eight one-day nations had made.

That mattered specifically to India. A side built to make 280 and defend it found that 220 was often a par score and that chasing under lights was easier than setting a target, and its two defeats both came batting first. It also stripped away the usual advantage of hosting: local knowledge is worth less when the pitches do not behave the way local pitches behave.

Chris Gayle scored 474 runs across the tournament, still the highest aggregate for a single Champions Trophy, and was player of the tournament; Jerome Taylor's 13 wickets were the most by any bowler. Neither came from a side that had been favoured beforehand.

What the exit cost, five months from a World Cup

India's next global assignment was the 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean, and the group-stage exit there — beaten by Bangladesh and Sri Lanka — is usually treated as the moment India's one-day cricket had to be rebuilt. The 2006 Champions Trophy was the warning that went unheeded: the same batting order failing to bat first, the same inability to force wickets in the middle overs, the same coach and captain under the same pressure. That sequence is set out on the India at the 2007 World Cup page.

It also closes a distinct phase of India's record in this competition. Three consecutive editions had produced a semi-final in 1998, a final in 2000 and a shared title in 2002; then came the pool exit in England described on the 2004 campaign page and this group exit at home. India would not win another Champions Trophy match until 2009. The full run of finishes is on the India at the Champions Trophy page, alongside the competition's own record on the Champions Trophy hub and the broader story on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Match dates, venues, totals, overs, margins and player-of-the-match awards come from the official record of the 2006 ICC Champions Trophy and the published scorecards for India's three Group A fixtures. The group table, including net run rate to three decimal places, is the final official standing.

Individual scores named here — Munaf Patel's 3 for 18, Collingwood's 38, Tendulkar's 35 from 41, Dhoni's 51 from 65, Dravid's 49 and 52, Sehwag's 65 from 90, McGrath's 2 for 34, Martyn's 73 not out and Chanderpaul's 51 — are from those scorecards. Bradshaw's three wickets are given without an economy figure because the two published records consulted differ on the runs conceded.

The squad follows the fourteen named for the tournament, with Sreesanth's late addition for the injured Agarkar noted as reported. Gayle's 474 runs and Taylor's 13 wickets are the edition's leading aggregates as published by the ICC. Descriptions of how the pitches played are drawn from match reports and from the pattern of totals across the twenty-one matches, not from ball-by-ball data, which is not available for this tournament. Records checked in August 2026.