LONDON — Pakistan’s players embraced, delirious, while grabbing stumps from the ground as mementos of a remarkable day. Their national team secured a scintillating upset on Sunday, defeating India, the defending titlist, to win its first International Cricket Council Champions Trophy.
Pakistan, the eighth and lowest seed in the 18-day tournament, beat India, its fiercest rival, by 180 runs.
Pakistan cricket has always been “a little blip of chaos to the straight lines of order,” as Osman Samiuddin wrote in the book “The Unquiet Ones: A History of Pakistan Cricket.”
The national team is renowned for its beguiling unpredictability and mad propensity to oscillate between the hapless and the sublime, often several times in the same match.