GROS ISLET, St. Lucia — Captain Rohit Sharma bludgeoned 92 off 41 balls against scratchy Australia and led India into the Twenty20 World Cup semifinals with a thumping 24-run win on Monday.
Sharma smacked this tournament’s fastest half-century off 19 balls and finished with eight sixes and seven boundaries as India plundered a tall 205-5 after being put in to bat.
Travis Head kept Australia in the hunt with a blistering 76 off 43 balls, but his teammates choked against spinners Kuldeep Yadav (2-24) and Axar Patel (1-21) to be restricted at 181-7.
India, unbeaten in the group stage, closed the Super Eight with three wins from three matches, and will take on Group 2 runner-up England in the second semifinal on Thursday.
“It’s quite satisfying, especially when you play like that,” Sharma said. “We don’t want to do anything different (in semifinals), we want to play the same way, understand what the individuals need to do in a given situation, and play freely.”
Unbeaten South Africa, which topped Group 2 with three out of three, won’t know its semifinal opponent until the last Super Eight game later Monday between Afghanistan and Bangladesh.
Australia is out if Afghanistan wins or Bangladesh wins by a big margin.
Sharma set the tone when he smashed Mitchell Starc’s second over for 29 runs with three sixes and two fours.
Virat Kohli was out for his second duck in the tournament, caught at midwicket off a Josh Hazlewood short ball. Kohli has just 66 runs in six games but Sharma was held back only by a five-minute rain delay.
“The 50s and 100s don’t matter, I wanted to bat with the same tempo and carry on,” Sharma said. “You want to make the bowlers think where the next shot is coming, and I think I managed to do that.”
A total of 76 of his runs came from boundaries and sixes, and he became the first batter to hit 200 sixes in T20 internationals. He also passed Kohli (4,103) and Pakistan’s Babar Azam (4,145) as the leading run-getter in the shortest format.
Sharma had the first century of this tournament in sight before he was undone by Starc’s yorker in the 12th over.
But middle-order batters Suryakumar Yadav (31), Shivam Dube (28) and Hardik Pandya (27) ensured India of the joint highest total against Australia in men’s T20 World Cup history.
Only Hazlewood (1-14) bowled at the right lengths in his four overs.
Australia lost David Warner in Arshdeep Singh’s (3-37) first over, but Head and captain Mitchell Marsh (37) counterpunched with a brisk 81-run, second-wicket stand off eight overs.
Patel’s brilliant one-handed catch removed Marsh, and Yadav clean-bowled Glenn Maxwell on 20 in the 14th over. Pandya smartly snapped up Marcus Stoinis at point.
After Head was deceived by Jasprit Bumrah’s slower ball, Australia’s challenge fizzled out in the death overs.
“It’s disappointing,” Marsh said. “India got the better of us … we’ve seen for 15 years what Rohit Sharma can do in that kind of mood, and he got off to an absolute flier.”
