India rejoices long-awaited overseas win

Craig Ray

India captain Saurav Ganguly and coach John Wright rejoiced in their team's' first win outside the sub-continent for 15 years after their victory over Zimbabwe in the first test on Sunday.

India beat the home side by eight wickets at the Queens Sports Club on the fourth day for their first win outside the sub-continent in 50 tests.

"I think if we play to our potential we are capable of winning anywhere," Wright said.

"We'll enjoy this game and the players will get some time off tomorrow and then we'll start thinking about the next match."

The second test begins on Friday at the Harare Sports Club.

"We've played well in this match," Ganguly said. "But I thought we could have done better.

"It's always good to win a test match but we've got to move forward from here and keep winning and play good cricket.

"We played well as a team and the contributions from Harbhajan (Singh) and Samir (Dighe) with the bat were very good.

"Their 80-run partnership for the eighth wicket (in the first innings) helped us win this test match.

"We could have batted a bit better in the first innings and our bowling needs work.

"I thought we bowled a bit short and we'll have to work on that. We need to pitch the ball up because, if you watch, none of them drive very well."

India needed just 53.3 overs to score the 184 runs needed for victory after they dismissed Zimbabwe for 328 in their second innings.

Indian opener Shiv Sunder Das was the best of the batsmen, scoring an unbeaten 82 to earn the man-of-the-match award.

He survived a big appeal for caught behind with the second ball of the innings but admitted the ball had touched his bat, even though umpire Daryl Harper gave him not out.

"Yes I nicked it but it's part of the game because in the first innings I got a bad decision," Das said.

"The plan was just to hang around and see what happened. Initially I thought about a hundred but then I was only concerned about winning the match."

Zimbabwe, who won the toss, scored only 173 in their first innings, which put them on the back foot for the rest of the match.

"In retrospect the first innings was our demise," Zimbabwe captain Heath Streak said.

"In the second innings we applied ourselves a lot better and got a reasonable total on the board and if we had done that in the first innings it wouldn't have come down to this.

"We could have gone for a win if we had a reasonable target to defend."

Mail Cricket Editor