Winning the toss, India chose to bat first on a flat track in Bengaluru. They wasted no time to get going. Captain Rohit Sharma led from the front, hitting two boundaries in the very first over off Aryan Dutt.

Shubman Gill hit India’s first six of the innings in the third over, and there was no looking back. India scored 91 in the first ten overs. Gill departed soon after scoring a 30-ball half-century. Virat Kohli knocked the ball around and looked set for a big one before getting undone by a Roelof van der Merwe arm ball.

However, it was the duo of Shreyas Iyer and KL Rahul that completely lit up the Chinnaswamy Stadium with their fireworks on Diwali evening. Both scored their respective individual centuries, taking India beyond 400 for the first time in the 2023 World Cup.

Iyer’s knock was a continuation of his purple patch of form. He had scored 77 against South Africa in Kolkata and 82 against Sri Lanka in Mumbai in the last two games, making it the very first occasion in the history of Indian ODI cricket that a No.4 batter scored 75-plus in three consecutive ODIs.

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In fact, Iyer’s run-scoring at No.4 has been so unprecedented that his tally of 287 runs in the last three matches is higher than the aggregate of any other Indian No.4 in a single edition of the men’s ODI World Cup.

Rahul came to the crease in the 29th over at the fall of Kohli’s wicket with India’s score reading 200-3. By the end of the 40th over, he was batting on 37 off 31 balls and accelerated rapidly to add another 65 off his next 33 at a strike rate of nearly 200.

Rahul reached his hundred in the last over of India’s innings with two back-to-back sixes, becoming India’s fastest centurion in World Cup history, having taken just 62 balls to get to the milestone, breaking the record set by his captain, Rohit, in India’s second game of this tournament against Afghanistan by one ball.

With each of the Indian top five crossing fifty, this became just the third such occasion in ODI history and the first for India. It was also the second occasion in men’s ODI World Cup history that two or more batters scored a century batting at No.4 or below.

Earlier in the afternoon, Rohit had broken the record for the most sixes hit by a batter in a calendar year in ODIs. He went past AB de Villiers’ record of 58 sixes in 2015 and now has 60 in 2023 so far.

India finished their innings with 410-4, making it their seventh 400-plus total in ODIs, only one less than South Africa who have crossed the 400-run mark eight times in the format, most by any team.