Dazzling Kohli ton keeps India alive :

India 321 for 3 (Kohli 133*) beat Sri Lanka 320 for 4 by seven wickets

Turnarounds don't come any better. Fortunes don't change more dramatically. And emotions don't bear a starker contrast. At the halfway stage, Sri Lanka would have felt they had one foot in the final, having left the India bowlers deflated after a dominating performance with the bat. And they would have been right to think that way, the Indian batting having shown little promise in the series and the team on the brink of elimination. 

But an imperious display of strokemaking by Virat Kohli, whose mercurial wrists powered an Indian fightback conspicuous in its absence on what had been, uptil now, two forgettable overseas trips, made a mockery of an imposing score, kept India's finals hopes alive and left Sri Lanka with the unenviable task of beating the form team in the tournament to knock India out. 

Given India's poor outings with the bat in their recent games, one wouldn't have been mistaken to expect them to struggle to chase a target of 321 in 50 overs. They achieved it in 36.4 - needing to chase it in 40 to stay alive in the series - and did so with Kohli finishing things off in a blaze of glory. Kohli was, as Nathan Astle said after his whirlwind 222 against England in 2002, "in the zone", dismissing anything that came his way with clinical precision, finding the boundary at will whether the field was in or pushed back, swift between the wickets to put the fielders regularly off guard and middling the ball with a consistency unmatched for some time. 

While Kohli was the protagonist in India's successful chase, the other characters played their due part. Virender Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar would have wanted to do more but gave India the explosive start they desperately needed to stage a counterattack; Gautam Gambhir continued to be fluent, just four boundaries in a knock of 63 in 64 balls showing the toil behind the runs and Suresh Raina, under pressure to perform, gave Kohli valuable company in a match-winning stand with a spunky cameo.