BRIDGETOWN — Nobody scripted Hardik Pandya for this. The last over of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2024 final started with South Africa needing sixteen runs. Kensington Oval, Barbados. Six deliveries. Pandya gave up 9. India won by 7 runs and claimed their second T20 world title — the first in seventeen years.
The number understates the compression. Pandya’s over was the final act in a match that had spent forty overs running as scripted — India setting a stiff target off a Virat Kohli innings that he would later describe as the most important of his T20 career, South Africa pressing back with Heinrich Klaasen threatening to rewrite the result entirely in the last five overs. That Klaasen could not finish it, and that Pandya could, is the whole story of the 2024 final.
Kohli’s 76 off 59 balls was the innings that built the target. He did not arrive at his best: the earlier overs were tentative, his scoring confined to gaps and singles while Rohit Sharma’s brisk opening gave India momentum. But from the 12th over forward, Kohli found the register that defines him at his fullest. Six sixes, a strike rate that accelerated exactly when South Africa needed it to plateau, a partnership with Axar Patel — who finished 47 not out off 31 balls — that added 72 for the fifth wicket and pushed India to 176 for 4.
That total looked competitive. Against Klaasen, it briefly looked insufficient.
Klaasen’s 52 off 27 balls — three sixes, four fours, a strike rate of 192 — was the innings that kept the final alive when everything about India’s campaign suggested it should not be. Jasprit Bumrah had bowled with extraordinary control, his 2 for 18 from four overs at an economy of 4.5 that should have strangled South Africa’s scoring from the outset. It did, for six overs. Then Klaasen got hold of Arshdeep Singh’s 16th over and hit it for 24, and suddenly the calculation changed entirely.
South Africa went from needing 41 off 3 overs to needing 16 off 1. Pandya’s over — three dots, a single, a two, another dot, then a stumping to end it — became the final in miniature: what India’s bowling unit gave away in the penultimate over, one bowler corrected in the last six deliveries.
Pandya, whose relationship with Indian cricket’s fan base had been complicated by injury, IPL controversy, and captaincy questions in the months before the tournament, took his four overs across the match for 30 runs and one wicket. His last over was not his best. It was enough. The stumping that ended it — Rishabh Pant, quick and certain — removed the final South African possibility before it could become a plan.
India’s second T20 World Cup title, seventeen years after their first, arrived in the Caribbean on a ground where fewer than ten thousand fans watched in person while the rest of the country tracked it on phones and screens during the working week. Rohit Sharma, whose record as T20 captain had been central to India’s selection calculus throughout, won the title in the format he has managed most carefully across the longest arc of his career.
For South Africa, it is another final, another near. Their campaign through the 2024 tournament had been more convincing than any previous edition — unbeaten before the final, clinical in every knockout match. The 7-run margin is the cruelest possible summary of that distance. They needed 16 off the last over with Klaasen gone but wickets remaining, and they got 9. Six deliveries separated South Africa from their first ICC title in any format, and those six deliveries went to Pandya.
Bumrah’s player of the tournament award was announced after the presentation. His economy across the tournament had been unlike anything produced in T20 World Cup cricket in the format’s two-decade history. India’s pace bowling depth in 2024 rested on his ability to make overs at the death feel like overs at the start — no concession to the pressure of the moment, no adjustment that a batter could read as surrender.
India, who had won the tournament without losing a game, left Barbados with the one trophy that had eluded them since Mahendra Singh Dhoni lifted it in Johannesburg in 2007. The 17-year wait ended in six Pandya deliveries and a stumping that Pant completed before the batter had finished his follow-through.
Kohli retired from T20 internationals immediately after the final. His 76 in Bridgetown was the last T20 innings of his international career. He left as world champion, which is not the worst way to leave anything.
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