Kolkata: India rode on Rohit Sharma's great double-century in the fourth ODI to get past a hapless Sri Lanka, who were found wanting all throughout the match.
Virat Kohli won the toss and made some changes which were pretty much expected in the line-up after Team India pocketed the series in the last ODI in Hyderabad.
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Both the openers, Ajinkya Rahane and Rohit Sharma vindicated Kohli's choice of batting first and took India off to a flyer before Rahane got out against the run of play.
Photo credit: BCCI.
Rahane started off brilliantly with a couple of boundaries and continued to be the aggressor in the opening partnership before misreading a slower one bowled with a scrambled seam by Angelo Mathews.
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Rahane did not help his cause by playing across the line and in the process missed the ball completely which led to his untimely dismissal on 28 off 23 balls.
Rahane's dismissal got Ambati Rayadu to the crease but his stay was only for a short while as he was cleaned up by a jaffa from Shaminda Eranga which pitched on the middle and off stump, moved just about enough to take the top of the off-stump. He was dismissed on 8.
Rohit, all this while was struggling to get going and made a really slow start to his innings. It took him a little over 70 balls to reach his half-century while the next 200 runs of his innings came in no time.
Rohit made mince meat of the Lankan attack as he showed his range of shots, hitting a boundary in almost every corner of the Eden Gardens.
The Lankan bowlers were reduced to a club level attack and as time went by it seemed, as if, Mathews and Co. were just going through the motions. The bowling was more than ordinary and to add to their misery, the fielding was just not up to the international standards.
Rohit was dropped early on by Thisara Perera when he was on 4 and this was not the only time it had happened in the match. Seekkuge Prasanna dropped a sitter after Rohit reached his double ton and Lahiru Thirimanne made it a hat trick of drops when the double-centurion reached 222.
Rohit's brilliant knock (264) came in just 171 balls with 33 fours and five sixes and took the match away from the Lankans with relative ease.
Virat Kohli (66) gave good support to Rohit as the Indian skipper brought up his half-century but a terrible mix-up between him and Rohit brought curtains to his knock.
Suresh Raina (11) departed in order to up the ante and India made a mammoth total of 404 runs which was always going to be a daunting task.
The Lankans went off to a worst possible start, as they lost Kusal Perera in the first over, who did not trouble the scorers.
Umesh Yadav was generating good pace and was also getting the ball to nip around a bit as lights took centre stage at the Eden Gardens.
Stuart Binny also had a point to prove and he did not disappoint with the ball in hand as he gave India the second break-through by showing Dinesh Chandimal the way towards the dressing room.
From there on, it was only downhill for the Lankans, as Mahela Jayawardene and Tillakaratne Dilshan soon followed Chandimal into the dressing room and it was left to Mathews (75) and Thirimanne (59) to restore some pride in the chase.
As they lost wickets in regular intervals, it gave them no chance to come back into the match.
Mathews, Thirimanne partnership tried to give some respectability to the total but it was always like going against the tide as the Sri Lankans succumbed to a score of 251, losing the match by 153 runs.
The Indian bowlers did their job as they kept the pressure on the batters and picked up wickets which gave the Sri Lankans no respite.
Yadav, Binny and Axar Patel picked up a couple of wickets each while Dhawal Kulkarni was the pick of the bowlers from the Indian side who picked up 4 wickets by giving away only 34 runs.
Angelo Mathews was the only lone bowler to have got away with an economy of under 6 from the Sri Lankan side and followed it up by picking up two wickets which was probably the only bright spot from the Lankan's perspective as it turned out to be a rather humiliating result for the visitors.
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