1983 Cricket World Cup

Result

Player of the Match (Final)

Mohinder Amarnath, India

Tournament format

8 teams in the same two-groups-of-four structure, but each team now played its group rivals twice (a "double round-robin") before the semi-finals and final -- doubling the group-stage schedule compared with 1975 and 1979. Again hosted entirely by England (with some matches played in Wales).

Full match archive

Every match of the 1983 tournament, not just the final — all 26 group-stage and semi-final matches, plus the final round-robin standings. See all 26 matches →

Final: match context

The third Cricket World Cup produced arguably the biggest upset in the sport's history: India, rank outsiders who had won only one match across the previous two World Cups combined, beat the two-time defending champion West Indies by 43 runs to claim their first title, at Lord's in front of a crowd of nearly 25,000. India had gone into the tournament at 66/1 with bookmakers and were not seriously fancied even by their own supporters, making the result one of the format's great shocks. Sent in to bat by West Indies, India were undone by a fearsome pace attack and collapsed to just 183 all out in 54.4 overs -- Andy Roberts took three wickets as India's top order struggled to build any partnership of substance. Krishnamachari Srikkanth's 38 and Mohinder Amarnath's 26 were the only scores of note in the top order, with Sandeep Patil (27) and Madan Lal (17) adding some resistance from the middle order; India's total looked, by any reasonable measure, well short of competitive against the reigning champions. West Indies' reply began disastrously and never really recovered. Gordon Greenidge was bowled first ball by military-medium seamer Balwinder Sandhu, an early psychological blow, and though Viv Richards counter-attacked to 33, he was eventually out attempting an ambitious pull shot that he mistimed straight to Kapil Dev, who ran back from mid-wicket to complete a running catch that has become one of the enduring images of the tournament. West Indies slid to 57 for 3 and could never build the partnership their total demanded; Madan Lal and Amarnath each took 3 wickets as the innings was bowled out for 140, handing India a 43-run win and their first World Cup title. The upset carried consequences far beyond the scoreline. India's win is widely credited with igniting the sport's commercial explosion on the subcontinent over the following decades -- the seed, many historians argue, of the financial and administrative dominance the Board of Control for Cricket in India would come to hold in the sport, and an early step on the road that eventually led to the Indian Premier League. It also ended West Indies' unbeaten run across the tournament's first two editions, a psychological blow the great West Indian side of the era never fully avenged at a World Cup. Elsewhere in the tournament, associate nation Zimbabwe -- playing in their first-ever World Cup -- pulled off their own shock win over Australia in the group stage, Duncan Fletcher scoring an unbeaten 69 and taking 4 wickets, a result that in hindsight looks like an early tremor before India's much larger earthquake in the final. David Gower was the tournament's leading run-scorer with 384, and India's Roger Binny topped the wicket-takers' list with 18.

Sources

• Wikipedia: 1983 Cricket World Cup
• Wikipedia: 1983 Cricket World Cup final
• ESPNcricinfo