India at the 1987 Cricket World Cup: Results, Squad & Stats
Written and checked by CricketTakenPublished Cricket in India12 min read
Two runs that were first signalled as four decided India's opening match of the 1987 World Cup. At Chepauk on 9 October, Dean Jones hit Maninder Singh towards the long-on boundary; the fielder signalled four, the umpires accepted the signal, and the entry stood until Australia's management raised it once the innings had finished. Kapil Dev agreed to the correction. Australia's total became 270 for 6, Geoff Marsh having made 110 of it. India were bowled out for 269 in 49.5 overs and lost by one run.
That was the first day of a tournament India began as holders and co-hosts. They then won their next five group matches, finished level with Australia on wins and ahead of them on run rate, and lost the semi-final at the Wankhede Stadium on 5 November to England by 35 runs. Both host countries went out in the same week — Pakistan were beaten by Australia at Lahore the day before — and the final at Eden Gardens was contested by Australia and England, Australia winning by seven runs.
The Reliance World Cup was the first held outside England and the first in which innings were 50 overs rather than 60. Eight teams were split into two groups of four, each side playing the others twice, with the group winners meeting the other group's runners-up in the semi-finals. It was also Sunil Gavaskar's last international assignment. He made 300 runs in it, including the only century of his one-day career, and his final innings for India was the 4 he made in the Bombay semi-final.
India's seven matches, from Chepauk to the Wankhede
| Date | Stage | Venue | Opponent | Scores | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9 Oct | Group A | Chennai | Australia | Australia 270/6; India 269 | Australia won by 1 run |
| 14 Oct | Group A | Bengaluru | New Zealand | India 252/7; New Zealand 236/8 | India won by 16 runs |
| 17 Oct | Group A | Wankhede, Bombay | Zimbabwe | Zimbabwe 135; India 136/2 | India won by 8 wickets |
| 22 Oct | Group A | Delhi | Australia | India 289/6; Australia 233 | India won by 56 runs |
| 26 Oct | Group A | Ahmedabad | Zimbabwe | Zimbabwe 191/7; India 194/3 | India won by 7 wickets |
| 31 Oct | Group A | Nagpur | New Zealand | New Zealand 221/9; India 224/1 | India won by 9 wickets |
| 5 Nov | Semi-final | Wankhede, Bombay | England | England 254/6; India 219 | England won by 35 runs |
Every one of India's group fixtures was played at home, in six different cities, and the semi-final returned to the ground where they had beaten Zimbabwe three weeks earlier. India's 289 for 6 at Feroz Shah Kotla was their highest total of the competition; the 136 they needed at the Wankhede was their smallest target.
Group A, and what topping it was worth
| Team | Played | Won | Lost | Run rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| India | 6 | 5 | 1 | 5.413 |
| Australia | 6 | 5 | 1 | 5.193 |
| New Zealand | 6 | 2 | 4 | 4.887 |
| Zimbabwe | 6 | 0 | 6 | 3.757 |
India and Australia split their two meetings and finished the group with identical records, so first place went on run rate. The practical consequence was the semi-final draw: India, as Group A winners, played the Group B runners-up, England, at Bombay, while Australia travelled to Lahore to meet Pakistan. Both of the sides that had lost their group met in the final, which is the sort of symmetry that makes 1987 awkward to argue about. India had beaten Australia at Delhi by 56 runs a fortnight before Australia won the trophy.
The fourteen Kapil Dev took into the tournament
| Player | Role in the campaign |
|---|---|
| Kapil Dev (capt) | Fast-medium bowler and middle-order batter — 72 not out at Bengaluru |
| Dilip Vengsarkar (vice-capt) | Middle-order batter — 63 v Australia at Delhi |
| Sunil Gavaskar | Opening batter — 300 runs, 103 not out at Nagpur |
| Kris Srikkanth | Opening batter — 75 at Nagpur, 70 at Chennai |
| Navjot Singh Sidhu | Batter — 276 runs, four fifties in his first four innings |
| Mohammad Azharuddin | Middle-order batter and occasional off spin — 64 in the semi-final, 3 for 19 at Delhi |
| Ravi Shastri | Left-arm spin and batting — 68.2 overs, seven wickets |
| Maninder Singh | Left-arm spin — 14 wickets, India's leading bowler |
| Manoj Prabhakar | Medium pace — 4 for 19 against Zimbabwe at the Wankhede |
| Chetan Sharma | Right-arm medium fast — hat-trick at Nagpur |
| Kiran More (wk) | Wicketkeeper — 42 not out from 26 balls at Bengaluru |
| Chandrakant Pandit | Wicketkeeper-batter — 24 in the semi-final |
| Roger Binny | Medium pace — one match, at Chennai |
| Laxman Sivaramakrishnan | Leg spin — two matches |
Man Singh was the team manager. The balance of the side is the thing worth noticing: three specialist spinners were carried and two of them bowled in most matches, while Kapil Dev was the only frontline seamer of standing. India bowled Maninder Singh's full ten overs in every match he played bar one, and used Azharuddin's off breaks as a genuine option rather than a filler.
Chennai, 9 October: 269 out of 270
Marsh batted through most of Australia's innings for 110, with David Boon making 49. India's reply was built by Srikkanth's 70 from 83 balls and Sidhu's 73 from 79, the two of them scoring at better than a run a ball in a period when few Indian batters did. Sidhu hit five sixes; Srikkanth hit seven fours. Their partnership work either side of the middle overs — 76 for the third wicket between Sidhu and Vengsarkar — left India needing modest acceleration and no heroics.
It did not come. Gavaskar had gone for 37, Azharuddin for 10, Kapil Dev for 6, and the innings closed on 269 with a ball still available. Two of Australia's 270 were the runs added after the event. India's supporters have replayed the correction ever since, but the arithmetic that actually lost the match sat in the middle order, where five batters between them made 33.
Bengaluru, the Wankhede and Delhi: three different ways to win
At the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium on 14 October, India were 170 for 7 and looking short of a total when Kapil Dev and Kiran More added 82 for the eighth wicket without being separated. Kapil made 72 not out from 58 balls, More 42 not out from 26. India reached 252 for 7 and New Zealand, needing to keep pace, finished on 236 for 8 with Maninder Singh and Ravi Shastri taking two apiece. The margin was 16 runs and the match award went to the captain.
Three days later at the Wankhede, Zimbabwe were dismissed for 135 in 44.2 overs. Manoj Prabhakar's 8 overs cost 19 and took four wickets — the best individual analysis by an India bowler in the tournament — and Maninder Singh's ten overs went for 21. Gavaskar made 43 and Vengsarkar 46 not out from 37 balls, and the target was reached inside 28 overs.
Delhi on 22 October was the return against Australia and the most complete performance of the six. India made 289 for 6, their highest of the tournament, with Vengsarkar's 63 from 60 balls, Gavaskar's 61, Sidhu's 51 and Azharuddin's unbeaten 54 from 45 balls. Azharuddin then bowled 3.5 overs of off spin for 19 runs and three wickets, Maninder took 3 for 34, and Australia were bowled out for 233 in 49 overs. The 56-run margin was India's widest of the competition. The longer story of these meetings is set out in the India and Australia rivalry guide.
Nagpur, 31 October: the first World Cup hat-trick, then Gavaskar
The last group match produced two things India had never had. Chetan Sharma bowled Ken Rutherford, Ian Smith and Ewen Chatfield in successive balls to record the first hat-trick in World Cup history, finishing with 3 for 51; New Zealand were held to 221 for 9.
India then chased 222 in 32.1 overs for the loss of one wicket. Srikkanth made 75 from 58 balls with nine fours and three sixes, Gavaskar 103 not out from 88 balls with ten fours and three sixes, and their opening partnership was worth 136. It was the only century Gavaskar made in a one-day career of more than a hundred matches, it came in his penultimate international innings, and the match award was shared between him and Chetan Sharma. A wider account of how India's white-ball cricket developed either side of it is in ODI cricket in India.
The Wankhede, 5 November: Gooch sweeps
England were 79 for 2 when Graham Gooch and Mike Gatting settled into the tactic that decided the match. Both swept India's spinners repeatedly and with intent, taking the risk out of the shot by playing it as a first option rather than a response. Gooch made 115 from 136 balls with eleven fours, Gatting 56, and England reached 254 for 6. Maninder Singh took 3 for 54 from his ten overs and Kapil Dev 2 for 38 from his, which on the day was a respectable return against a plan India could not disturb.
India's chase was Azharuddin's. He made 64 from 74 balls and was the last of the top order to go; Srikkanth had made 31, Sidhu 22, Gavaskar 4, Kapil Dev 30 from 22 balls and Chandrakant Pandit 24. Eddie Hemmings took 4 for 52 from 9.3 overs and the innings ended on 219 in 45.3 overs, the last wickets falling quickly once Azharuddin was out. England lost the final at Eden Gardens three days later. India's record against them across formats and decades is traced in the India and England rivalry guide.
Sidhu 276, Maninder 14
Batting: every India player who passed 150 runs in the tournament.
| Player | Innings | Runs | Highest | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sunil Gavaskar | 7 | 300 | 103* | 50.00 |
| Navjot Singh Sidhu | 5 | 276 | 75 | 55.20 |
| Kris Srikkanth | 7 | 248 | 75 | 35.42 |
| Mohammad Azharuddin | 5 | 190 | 64 | 63.33 |
| Dilip Vengsarkar | 5 | 171 | 63 | 57.00 |
| Kapil Dev | 5 | 152 | 72* | 50.66 |
Bowling: every India player who took five or more wickets.
| Player | Overs | Wickets | Best | Average | Economy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maninder Singh | 70.0 | 14 | 3/21 | 20.00 | 4.00 |
| Manoj Prabhakar | 59.0 | 9 | 4/19 | 26.11 | 3.98 |
| Ravi Shastri | 68.2 | 7 | 2/45 | 39.14 | 4.00 |
| Chetan Sharma | 36.1 | 6 | 3/51 | 28.33 | 4.70 |
| Kapil Dev | 62.0 | 5 | 2/38 | 51.80 | 4.17 |
| Mohammad Azharuddin | 23.5 | 5 | 3/19 | 21.80 | 4.57 |
Graham Gooch finished as the tournament's leading run scorer with 471 and Craig McDermott as its leading wicket-taker with 18. Maninder Singh's 14 put him level with Patrick Patterson in fourth place on that list, and no India batter reached the top five.
Sidhu's four fifties — 73 at Chennai, 75 at Bengaluru, 51 at Delhi, 55 at Ahmedabad — came in his first four innings of the competition, since he did not bat in the eight-wicket win over Zimbabwe at the Wankhede. His fifth and last innings was the 22 he made in the semi-final.
Four things the 1987 figures show
India could not chase anything substantial. They batted second five times, won three of those matches by eight, seven and nine wickets, and lost both occasions on which the target was above 250. Chasing 136, 192 and 222 they conceded a combined total of four wickets; chasing 271 and 255 they were bowled out twice. For a side whose batting was praised throughout the tournament, that is a narrow band of competence.
Kapil Dev's tournament was a batting one. Five innings for 152 runs at a strike rate of 126.66 was the fastest scoring of anyone in the India side by a distance, and the 72 not out at Bengaluru effectively won that match. With the ball he bowled 62 overs for five wickets at 51.80, comfortably the worst average among India's regular bowlers, and took no wickets at all in three of the seven matches.
Azharuddin's part-time off spin was the most efficient bowling India had. Five wickets from 23.5 overs works out at a wicket every 28.6 balls, better than any other India bowler in the competition, and his 3 for 19 in under four overs decided the Delhi match. India used him for fewer than four overs a game.
The top four carried the batting almost entirely. Gavaskar, Sidhu, Srikkanth and Vengsarkar made 995 runs between them across the seven matches; every other India batter combined for 515. Azharuddin and Kapil Dev were productive when they got in, but the pattern of the campaign was three or four established batters and then a scramble — which is exactly what happened at Chepauk and again at the Wankhede. The full arc from 1975 to the present is in India at the World Cup, the next campaign in India at the 1992 Cricket World Cup, and every edition of the competition is indexed on the fifty-over World Cup hub, with this tournament's own page at the 1987 World Cup. Records at the ground where the campaign ended are collected under Wankhede Stadium, and the rest of the game in the country under cricket in India. Kapil Dev's own career, of which this was the middle chapter, is covered on his player page.
Sources and method
Dates, venues, scores, margins and result details come from ESPNcricinfo scorecards and tournament records for the 1987 Reliance World Cup, cross-checked against the ICC's tournament overview and the published group tables. The squad is the fourteen named by the BCCI, with Kapil Dev as captain and Dilip Vengsarkar as vice-captain.
The batting and bowling tables are the published India aggregates for the tournament, reproduced without adjustment. The qualification thresholds — 150 runs for the batting list, five wickets for the bowling list — are stated so the reader can see what has been left out rather than guess at it. Averages and economy rates are as published; strike-rate-per-wicket figures quoted in the closing section were computed from the same overs-and-wickets columns.
The 995-and-515 split of India's runs was computed by adding the published individual aggregates and excludes extras, so it will not reconcile exactly with India's team totals. Group placings are as recorded in the official tables, where India and Australia finished level on wins and were separated on run rate. The account of the corrected boundary at Chepauk follows contemporary reports and Dean Jones's own later description; the assessment of England's sweeping in the semi-final is a judgement about tactics rather than a computed figure, and is presented as one. Figures were re-checked in August 2026.