Rohit Sharma leads India to Champions Trophy final triumph over New Zealand

And so ends an impressively fatuous experiment: what happens when the best team in the world gets the dice loaded in its favour? On a sultry night at the Dubai International Stadium, we got the entirely foreseeable answer. Pakistan’s tournament is India’s glory, by four wickets with six balls to spare: a triumph that felt as immaculately controlled as the months of sabre-rattling and politicking that preceded it.

None of which is to diminish the acclaim due to India’s players: men of skill and men of character, men who step up and deliver under pressure. They did not devise the format in which everyone else travelled, toiled and adapted while they stayed put. They did not construct the apparatus of a global game run in the interests of one country. Ironically they are easily good enough to have won this trophy without any competitive advantage, in any conditions, on any schedule: a side that bears comparison with any to grace the white-ball game.

And after a journey of 4,379 miles, from Karachi to Rawalpindi to Dubai to Lahore and back to Dubai, New Zealand finally ran out of road. They won the toss. They scrambled to a competitive total. Glenn Phillips took a stunning catch. Michael Bracewell had one of the games of his life. They got Virat Kohli out second ball. But ultimately there is little point in winning the inches when your opponent still has all the yards.

As deep as it ultimately went, there has been an inexorability to India all the way through this tournament, an immaculate calmness, an inability to conceive the circumstances in which they might be beaten. Chasing 252, Rohit Sharma set them up with a brisk 76; KL Rahul was the consummate finisher at the end despite – in his own words – “shitting himself” as the chase tightened.

But really this was a palace built on spin: the mesmerising 38 overs delivered by Kuldeep Yadav, Varun Chakravarthy, Axar Patel and Ravindra Jadeja at suffocating speed, a constriction that felt slow and fast all at once. After taking 69 from the 10-over powerplay, it took New Zealand until the 31st over to double their score. Just four boundaries came between the ninth and the 43rd overs.

Kuldeep’s first ball, a pinpoint googly to clean up Rachin Ravindra for a streaky 37, set the tone. His eighth, held back a little, tempted Kane Williamson into a leading edge. Indeed New Zealand’s first five wickets all fell to full deliveries in which the batter failed to get sufficiently forward: a measure of how India’s immaculate length had pinned them back, a kind of beautiful paralysis. Daryl Mitchell’s 91-ball half-century was the slowest by a New Zealander in 11 years, and for most of his colleagues the agony was appreciably briefer.

A late flurry from Bracewell yielded 67 off the last seven overs, at which point the most economical powerplay attack in the tournament – albeit missing the injured Matt Henry – was well in the game. Instead Rohit hit the second ball of the innings for six, Will O’Rourke’s first over went for 13 and the honest hard lengths of Nathan Smith were treated with nothing but disdain. By the time Phillips claimed Shubman Gill with a ridiculous overhead grab at extra cover, India had knocked 105 off the target at roughly even time.

The spin of Mitchell Santner and Ravindra, and later Bracewell, applied a brake and sent the required rate creeping back up towards a run a ball. But arguably this was also the period when the game slipped away. Phillips wheeled away for five tidy but unthreatening overs at a time when New Zealand needed wickets and India were happy to accumulate. Kyle Jamieson was inexplicably held back until the 48th over, by which time the contest was done.

Shreyas Iyer and Axar chipped away, Rahul paced the acceleration perfectly and before long a partisan crowd – many of whom had booked last-minute flights out to Dubai – was revelling in another display of Indian dominance. And for many India fans there will be a certain cold relish in the way events have panned out: Pakistan conquered, Pakistan upstaged, and without ever having to set foot in the place. Even the interval entertainment, Vishal Mishra, was Indian.

And yes, it is considered exceptionally bad form to mention this kind of stuff. Leave politics out of sport scream the people busy rewriting sport along the lines of politics. But perhaps one of the more underrated pieces of collateral damage here has been the excellence of this Indian team itself: an all-time great side that has mastered every aspect of the game and yet finds itself pursued wherever it goes by rancour, resentment, the unmistakeable whiff of administrative bias.

Their record in the last three global white-ball tournaments? Played 24, won 23. The hosts of the next? India.