India at the 2009 T20 World Cup: Results, Squad & Stats

India went to the 2009 World Twenty20 as holders and left it without playing a knockout match. They won both group games at Trent Bridge comfortably, moved into a Super Eight group with England, South Africa and the West Indies, and lost all three — by seven wickets, by three runs and by twelve runs. The margins say the matches were close. The totals say something narrower: India did not pass 153 in any of them.

The tournament was the second World Twenty20 and the first staged in England: twelve teams in four groups of three, with the top two from each going into two Super Eight groups of four, and the top two from those into semi-finals. Pakistan won it, beating Sri Lanka by eight wickets in the final at Lord's on 21 June, three days after knocking out South Africa by seven runs. Their campaign is described on the 2009 T20 World Cup title page.

MS Dhoni's side arrived directly from the second Indian Premier League season, which had been relocated to South Africa that April and May, and the schedule was widely raised at the time as a factor. Virender Sehwag was ruled out with a shoulder injury and replaced by Dinesh Karthik on 9 June, after India's first match. Whatever weight those things carry, the cricket produced a specific and repeated failure: three innings in the Super Eight that all stalled between the tenth and sixteenth overs.

India's five matches

Date	Stage	Venue	Opponent	Scores	Result
6 Jun	Group A	Trent Bridge	Bangladesh	India 180/5; Bangladesh 155/8	India won by 25 runs
10 Jun	Group A	Trent Bridge	Ireland	Ireland 112/8; India 113/2 (15.3)	India won by 8 wickets
12 Jun	Super Eight	Lord's	West Indies	India 153/7; West Indies 156/3 (18.4)	West Indies won by 7 wickets
14 Jun	Super Eight	Lord's	England	England 153/7; India 150/5	England won by 3 runs
16 Jun	Super Eight	Trent Bridge	South Africa	South Africa 130/5; India 118/8	South Africa won by 12 runs

India's 180 for 5 against Bangladesh was their only score above 155 in the tournament. In the three Super Eight matches they made 153 for 7, 150 for 5 and 118 for 8.

Group A, then a Super Eight group won by nobody India beat

Team	Played	Won	Lost	Net run rate	Points
India	2	2	0	+1.227	4
Ireland	2	1	1	−0.162	2
Bangladesh	2	0	2	−0.966	0

India topped Group A and went into Super Eight Group E with South Africa, the West Indies and England. South Africa won all three of their matches there, the West Indies won two, England one and India none. South Africa and the West Indies went to the semi-finals; India finished bottom of a group in which every side beat them and nobody they played beat everybody.

Dhoni's fifteen, and one replacement

Player	Role in the campaign
MS Dhoni (capt, wk)	Wicketkeeper-batter — 86 runs, 30 not out against England
Gautam Gambhir	Opening batter — 148 runs, 50 against Bangladesh
Rohit Sharma	Batter — 131 runs, 52 not out against Ireland
Yuvraj Singh	Middle-order batter — 153 runs at a strike rate of 154.54, nine sixes
Suresh Raina	Batter — five matches, 20 runs
Yusuf Pathan	Allrounder — 65 runs at 151.16, two wickets
Irfan Pathan	Left-arm swing and batting — three matches
Ravindra Jadeja	Left-arm spin and batting — two matches, three wickets at 11.66
Harbhajan Singh	Off spin — five wickets, 3 for 30 against England
Pragyan Ojha	Left-arm spin — seven wickets in three matches at 9.71
Zaheer Khan	Left-arm fast — seven wickets, 4 for 19 against Ireland
Ishant Sharma	Right-arm fast — 15 overs, two wickets
RP Singh	Left-arm fast-medium — two matches
Praveen Kumar	Medium pace — did not play
Dinesh Karthik	Wicketkeeper-batter, replacement for Sehwag — did not play

Gary Kirsten was the coach. Two of the sixteen players involved never took the field, and the more consequential absence was a selection rather than an injury: Pragyan Ojha, who finished with the best bowling average and the best strike rate in the squad, played only the Bangladesh, Ireland and West Indies matches. The developing shape of India's short-format side either side of this tournament is set out in the history of T20 international cricket in India.

Trent Bridge: 180 for 5, and Ireland for 112

The first match was the most convincing thing India did. Gambhir made 50 from 46 balls, Rohit Sharma 36 from 23 and Yuvraj Singh 41 from 18 with four sixes; India reached 180 for 5. Pragyan Ojha then took 4 for 21 from his four overs and Ishant Sharma 2 for 34, and Bangladesh finished on 155 for 8. Twenty-five runs, and India's net run rate was set for the group.

Ireland four days later were held to 112 for 8, Zaheer Khan taking 4 for 19 from three overs and Ojha 2 for 18. Gambhir's 37 and Rohit Sharma's unbeaten 52 produced an opening stand of 77 and India were home in 15.3 overs. Two matches, two comfortable wins, the top of the group and a bowling attack that had taken sixteen wickets in eight overs fewer than it was allowed.

Lord's, 12 June: 153 was not enough

The Super Eight opened against the West Indies at Lord's. Yuvraj Singh made 67 from 43 balls with two sixes, the highest score any India batter made in the tournament, and added 64 for the fifth wicket with Yusuf Pathan, who made 31 from 23. Around them the innings did very little: Gambhir 14, Rohit Sharma 5, Suresh Raina 5, Dhoni 11 from 23 balls. India finished on 153 for 7.

The West Indies chased it with 156 for 3 in 18.4 overs. India's four frontline bowlers conceded 26, 27, 29 and 31 in their allotted overs, and no bowler took more than one wicket. Yuvraj Singh's innings, one of many that defined his short-format career, is covered on his player page.

Lord's, 14 June: three runs

England batted first and made 153 for 7, Harbhajan Singh taking 3 for 30 and Ravindra Jadeja 2 for 26. India needed 154 and lost their first five wickets for 87: Gambhir 26, Jadeja 25 from 35 balls, Yuvraj Singh 17 from 9, Rohit Sharma 9, Raina 2.

Dhoni and Yusuf Pathan then added 63 without being separated — Pathan 33 not out from 17 balls, Dhoni 30 not out from 20 — and India finished on 150 for 5, three short. Their sixth-wicket pair had made 63 of the 150; the five batters dismissed before them had made 87 between them. It was the result that put the holders out, and the fixture's longer history is set out in the India and England rivalry guide.

Trent Bridge, 16 June: 130 was enough

The last match was already dead as a qualification question, and India lost it in the way the tournament had been threatening. South Africa made 130 for 5 with AB de Villiers scoring 63 from 51 balls; Harbhajan took 1 for 20 from four overs and Ravindra Jadeja 1 for 9 from three, which is the tightest bowling India produced in the Super Eight.

Chasing 131 in twenty overs, India were bowled to a standstill by South Africa's spinners. Rohit Sharma made 29 from 28 balls, Yuvraj Singh 25 from 25, Gambhir 21 from 19, and nobody else reached 15. India were 118 for 8. Losing while chasing 131 in a Twenty20 match is a batting failure without extenuation, and it ended the defence of a title India had won two years earlier at the 2007 World Twenty20.

Yuvraj 153, Ojha and Zaheer 7 apiece

Five matches is a small sample. Every India player who batted or bowled is listed and no qualification threshold is applied, because with five matches a threshold would hide most of the squad.

Player	Innings	Runs	Highest	Average	Strike rate	Sixes
Yuvraj Singh	5	153	67	38.25	154.54	9
Gautam Gambhir	5	148	50	29.60	109.62	1
Rohit Sharma	5	131	52*	32.75	122.42	3
MS Dhoni	5	86	30*	21.50	96.62	1
Yusuf Pathan	4	65	33*	32.50	151.16	3
Ravindra Jadeja	2	32	25	32.00	78.04	0
Harbhajan Singh	2	27	14	27.00	142.10	1
Suresh Raina	4	20	10	5.00	68.96	0
Irfan Pathan	2	13	11*	13.00	216.66	1
Zaheer Khan	2	4	4	4.00	133.33	0
RP Singh	1	2	2*	—	100.00	0

Player	Overs	Wickets	Best	Average	Economy
Zaheer Khan	14.4	7	4/19	17.57	8.38
Pragyan Ojha	11.0	7	4/21	9.71	6.18
Harbhajan Singh	20.0	5	3/30	26.20	6.55
Ravindra Jadeja	7.0	3	2/26	11.66	5.00
Yusuf Pathan	7.0	2	1/26	26.50	7.57
Ishant Sharma	15.0	2	2/34	62.50	8.33
RP Singh	5.0	2	1/13	17.00	6.80
Suresh Raina	1.0	1	1/6	6.00	6.00
Irfan Pathan	7.0	1	1/9	51.00	7.28
Yuvraj Singh	7.0	0	—	—	7.00

Tillakaratne Dilshan of Sri Lanka was the tournament's leading run scorer with 317 and Umar Gul of Pakistan its leading wicket-taker with 13. Yuvraj Singh's 153 was less than half Dilshan's aggregate, which is what going out after five matches does to a batting figure.

Four things the 2009 numbers show

Spin was India's better bowling and it bowled fewer overs than seam. Harbhajan Singh, Ojha and Ravindra Jadeja bowled 38 overs between them for 234 runs and 15 wickets — an economy rate of about 6.2 and a wicket every fifteen or sixteen runs. Zaheer Khan, Ishant Sharma, RP Singh and Irfan Pathan bowled 41.4 overs for 333 runs and 12 wickets, at about eight an over. On slow English pitches in June that distribution was the wrong way round.

The most effective bowler played three of the five matches. Ojha's seven wickets came at 9.71 with an economy rate of 6.18 and a wicket every 9.4 balls, comfortably the best strike rate in the side, and he did not play against England or South Africa. India's two exits from the Super Eight were sealed in those two matches.

Yuvraj Singh hit nine of India's nineteen sixes. His 153 runs came from 99 balls; nobody else in the side struck at better than 151 while scoring more than 65. Once he was dismissed at Lord's on 12 June the innings had no comparable acceleration available, which is visible in the difference between India's 153 and the West Indies' 156 for 3 with eight balls to spare.

India's middle order did not function. Suresh Raina made 20 runs in four innings at a strike rate of 68.96 and Dhoni 86 at 96.62 — both slower than either opener, in a format where the middle order is meant to be the faster half of the innings. Two years later the same core won a fifty-over World Cup at home; the next Twenty20 campaign, in the Caribbean, is covered in India at the 2010 T20 World Cup, Dhoni's captaincy across formats on his player page, and every edition of the competition on the T20 World Cup hub with this one at the 2009 tournament. The rest of the game in the country sits under cricket in India.

Sources and method

Dates, venues, innings scores, overs, margins and individual figures come from ESPNcricinfo scorecards and tournament records for the 2009 ICC World Twenty20, checked against the official Group A table and the Super Eight results. The squad is the fifteen India named, with MS Dhoni as captain and wicketkeeper; Dinesh Karthik joined as Virender Sehwag's replacement on 9 June and did not play, and nor did Praveen Kumar.

The batting and bowling tables list every India player who batted or bowled, with no qualification threshold, because a threshold across five matches would remove most of the squad. Averages, strike rates and economy rates are as published.

The spin-and-seam comparison in the closing section was computed by adding the published overs, runs and wickets columns for the three spinners and the four seam bowlers respectively; the resulting economy rates are approximate to one decimal place. The six-hitting split was taken from the published sixes column. Comments about the IPL schedule and about Ojha's selection are context and interpretation rather than computed facts, and are presented as such. Figures were re-checked in August 2026.