India win the T20 World Cup  as they hold off South Africa by seven runs after posting highest ever total in a final... before Virat Kohli announces his T20 international retirement

 India lifted their first World Cup in 13 years after a choke for the ages from South Africa at Bridgetown.

Needing an apparently unloseable 26 off four overs with six wickets in hand, with Heinrich Klaasen on the march, they somehow collapsed to a seven-run defeat. The result left India’s fans at Kensington Oval delirious, and the South African players incredulous, with David Miller - caught on the boundary in the last over - in tears.

The result was a triumph for India’s seamers, who preyed on the South Africans’ long history of bottling the big games. After the outstanding Jasprit Bumrah had conceded only four singles in the 16th over, Hardik Pandya had Klaasen - who had just completed a 23-ball half-century - edging a big drive from the first delivery of the 17th.

That over, too, cost only four, before Bumrah returned to bowl Marco Jansen in the 18th, and give away just two singles. Evidence that South Africa had stopped thinking clearly came when tailender Keshav Maharaj took a single off the last ball of the over, with the big-hitting Miller waiting to pounce at the other end.

When Arshdeep Singh’s 19th cost just four, South Africa needed 16 off the last, only for Miller to be brilliantly on the long-off boundary by Suryakumar Yadav off Pandya. As rain began to fall, their tail couldn’t come close.

India’s triumph - their first at a T20 World Cup since the inaugural tournament back in 2007 - meant that the slowest fifty of Virat Kohli’s career, from 48 balls, went unpunished, even if he sped up towards the end with 26 from his last 11 deliveries. 

He later announced his retirement from T20 internationals.

'This was my last T20 game playing for India,' Kohli said following India's seven-run victory at Kensington Oval.

'Time for the next generation to take the T20 game forward.'

But as Quinton de Kock, Tristan Stubbs and Klaasen, who launched five sixes, tucked into India’s spinners, Kohli’s innings looked as if it had cost India the match. Then came Bumrah and Pandya - and an old South African habit that refuses to die.