India at the 2009 Champions Trophy: Results, Squad & Stats

Nine days, three matches, three points and third place in the group. India went to South Africa in September 2009 as one of the better-regarded one-day sides in the world, lost to Pakistan at SuperSport Park, watched their game against Australia abandoned with the Australians 234 for 4 and India yet to bat, and beat West Indies at the Wanderers when it no longer counted for anything.

The abandonment is the fact that decides how the campaign should be read. India took one point from a match in which they never held a bat, and finished on three — two behind Australia and one behind Pakistan. Their net run rate of 0.290 was ahead of only West Indies. On a fully played Group A, India would have needed to beat Australia and would still have needed help; as it was they were beaten twice over, once by Shoaib Malik and once by the weather.

The tournament they were playing in had already been moved twice. It was awarded to Pakistan for September 2008, postponed by the ICC when several boards declined to travel on security grounds, and reassigned to South Africa for the following September. Only two grounds were used, both in Gauteng, and the new eight-team, two-group format introduced here has been used at every edition since.

India's three matches in Group A

Date	Venue	Opponent	Scores	Result	Player of the match
26 Sep 2009	SuperSport Park, Centurion	Pakistan	Pakistan 302/9 (50 ov); India 248 (44.5 ov)	Lost by 54 runs	Shoaib Malik (Pakistan)
28 Sep 2009	SuperSport Park, Centurion	Australia	Australia 234/4 (42.3 ov); India did not bat	No result, rain	Not awarded
30 Sep 2009	Wanderers Stadium, Johannesburg	West Indies	West Indies 129 (36 ov); India 130/3 (32.1 ov)	Won by 7 wickets	Virat Kohli (India)

One completed win, one completed defeat, one match India were not given the chance to lose. It is the shortest useful summary of a campaign in which India's batting was tested once and their bowling twice.

Three points, and third on the table

Team	Played	Won	Lost	No result	Points	Net run rate
Australia	3	2	0	1	5	0.510
Pakistan	3	2	1	0	4	0.999
India	3	1	1	1	3	0.290
West Indies	3	0	3	0	0	-1.537

Pakistan had already beaten India and West Indies before the last round of group matches, so their four points were secure. India's win over West Indies on 30 September took them to three, and on the same day Australia held Pakistan off by two wickets in the last over of a low-scoring game at Centurion. That result took Australia to five points and settled the two qualifying places. For India to have gone through, Australia would have had to lose that match and then be overhauled on run rate, and the question never had to be asked.

Centurion: Shoaib Malik's 128, and 302 to chase

Pakistan made 302 for 9 from their fifty overs, which on a used SuperSport Park surface in late September was a large total rather than an impossible one. Shoaib Malik made 128 from 126 balls and was named player of the match — an innings of accumulation rather than assault, built on running and on picking off the bowler India were least able to protect. Ashish Nehra took 4 for 55 from his ten overs and was the only Indian bowler who looked like taking wickets.

India were bowled out for 248 in 44.5 overs. Rahul Dravid made 76 from 103 balls and held the innings together for as long as it lasted; Saeed Ajmal took two wickets and, more damagingly, went at under four an over during the middle period when India needed to be accelerating. Once Dravid was out the chase folded quickly, and the 54-run margin understates how far behind India had fallen. The full fixture ledger sits on the India versus Pakistan ODI record page.

The match that was never completed

Two days later, on the same ground, Australia batted first and were 234 for 4 after 42.3 overs when rain arrived and did not leave. Michael Hussey's 67 from 65 balls was the innings of the truncated day; Nehra bowled eight overs for 38 and a wicket. The match was abandoned without India batting and both sides took a point.

A shared point was a good deal worse for India than for Australia. Australia had beaten West Indies and would beat Pakistan, so five points from three matches was enough to top the group. India had lost their opener and now had one point from two games, which meant a win over West Indies could only lift them to three and left their fate entirely with other results. Two of India's three matches at this tournament were therefore decided by something other than India's batting: one by a hundred from an opponent, one by weather.

The Wanderers: Kohli, 79 not out, and a chase worth remembering

West Indies were bowled out for 129 in 36 overs at the Wanderers on 30 September. Praveen Kumar took 3 for 22 from nine overs, moving the ball both ways with the new one; Darren Sammy's 23 from 38 balls was the top score in an innings that never got going. It was a depleted West Indies squad — the first-choice players were in dispute with their board that year — and the batting showed it.

India lost three wickets chasing 130 and needed 32.1 overs, which tells you the pitch was doing something. What makes the match worth a paragraph is who finished it. Virat Kohli, twenty years old and in the squad only because of an injury to somebody else, made 79 not out from 104 balls and was named player of the match. It was his first significant innings at a global tournament, and the method — bat through, take no risk that was not needed, finish it — was recognisably the one he used for the next fifteen years.

India were already out when he did it. That is worth stating plainly rather than glossing: the innings mattered for what it started, not for what it won.

Dhoni's fifteen, and the injury that made room for Kohli

Player	Role in the squad
MS Dhoni	Captain, wicketkeeper, batter
Sachin Tendulkar	Batter
Rahul Dravid	Batter
Gautam Gambhir	Opening batter
Virat Kohli	Batter, called up for Yuvraj Singh
Suresh Raina	Batter
Dinesh Karthik	Wicketkeeper, batter
Yusuf Pathan	Batting allrounder
Abhishek Nayar	Allrounder
Harbhajan Singh	Off spin
Amit Mishra	Leg spin
Ashish Nehra	Left-arm seam
Praveen Kumar	Seam
Ishant Sharma	Seam
RP Singh	Left-arm seam

Yuvraj Singh fractured a little finger and was replaced by Kohli, who at that point had played a handful of one-day internationals and had been picked originally as cover during the previous winter. The squad otherwise carried both ends of a transition: Tendulkar and Dravid, who between them had played in every Champions Trophy since the competition began, alongside Gautam Gambhir, Raina, Kohli and a four-man seam group with an average age in the mid-twenties.

MS Dhoni was captaining India at his second Champions Trophy. His first, in 2006, had also ended in the group stage — that campaign is on the 2006 Champions Trophy page — and his third, in 2013, ended with the trophy.

Two grounds, fifty kilometres apart

The whole tournament was played at the Wanderers and at SuperSport Park, roughly fifty kilometres apart on the Highveld, which is unusual for an ICC event and had consequences. Pitches were reused inside a fortnight, so later matches were played on surfaces that had already staged cricket, and the altitude at both venues helped the ball carry. Totals varied wildly as a result: 302 in one India match, 129 in another, on grounds forty minutes' drive from each other.

Australia won the tournament, beating New Zealand by six wickets in the final at Centurion on 5 October. Shane Watson made 105 not out in the final having made 136 not out in the semi-final against England, and was man of the match in both. Ricky Ponting's 288 runs made him player of the tournament and Wayne Parnell's eleven wickets were the most by any bowler, taken in only three matches for a South African side that went out in the group stage. Australia became the first team to win the Champions Trophy twice and remain the only one to have retained it. The whole edition is on the 2009 Champions Trophy page.

What 2009 turned into

India's next two global tournaments answer the question this one left open. They won the 2011 World Cup at home eighteen months later; that campaign is on the India at the 2011 World Cup page. Then they won this competition outright in England in 2013, unbeaten across five matches.

So the useful way to file the 2009 campaign is as the last poor India showing before a good run rather than as part of a bad one. Eight of the fifteen who went to South Africa — Dhoni, Tendulkar, Gambhir, Kohli, Raina, Yusuf Pathan, Harbhajan Singh and Nehra — were in the World Cup-winning squad, and the twenty-year-old who batted India home at the Wanderers was captaining the country by the time the Champions Trophy was next contested in 2017. The sequence of finishes across every edition is on the India at the Champions Trophy page, the competition's own record on the Champions Trophy hub, and the surrounding story of India's fifty-over cricket on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Dates, venues, totals, overs, results and awards for India's three Group A matches are taken from the official record of the 2009 ICC Champions Trophy and the published scorecards. The group table, including net run rate, is the final official standing at the end of the group stage.

Individual figures named on this page come from those scorecards: Shoaib Malik's 128 from 126 balls, Nehra's 4 for 55 and 1 for 38, Dravid's 76 from 103, Ajmal's two wickets, Hussey's 67 from 65, Praveen Kumar's 3 for 22, Sammy's 23 and Kohli's 79 not out from 104 balls. The fifteen-man squad and Kohli's call-up in place of the injured Yuvraj Singh follow the squad announcement and the replacement notified to the ICC.

Ponting's 288 runs, Parnell's eleven wickets and Watson's two unbeaten hundreds are the edition's published records. Statements about why India failed to qualify are arithmetic from the group table rather than opinion; statements about how an innings was constructed are readings of the scorecards and contemporary reports, since no public ball-by-ball file covers these matches. Reviewed against those sources in August 2026.