It's the hosts' game to lose as a nation awaits final reckoning

PICTURE yourself waking up as Virat Kohli on Sunday morning and imagine for a minute how much sleep you might have managed through the night. A minute, in fact, would be pretty good going.

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Sportspeople are not normal; the restless nights that precede the biggest days more likely to be born of kid-atChristmas fever than the kind of anxious dread that would no doubt afflict mortals like you or I. Even for the superhuman, though — and Kohli ranks top of that class — days like these must do something different.

It is a cliche to describe this World Cup Final meeting with Australia as India’s date with destiny, but untrue only because of the extent to which the nation, as a cricketing force, has paved the road to the occasion itself.

India, as a country, team and institution, is a behemoth, still even now on the rise, cricket’s new-era ruler flush with incomparable wealth, forger of a peerless one-day side on the brink of one of sport’s most dominant campaigns, in a tournament existing under an ICC banner for decorative purposes only, spurred on by far north of a billion acolyte obsessives.