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India play their 1000th ODI when they take the field against West Indies on Sunday, becoming the first side to reach the landmark. ESPNcricinfo looks back at some of the iconic moments in India's ODI history, with their first match in the format having come back in 1974.

Eleven weeks ahead of the third men's ODI World Cup, India's ODI record made for bleak reading: 11 wins in 38 matches. And although six of those wins had come outside India, only one happened to be in a World Cup, when they beat East Africa in 1975.

"It's this particular win that helps convince many of us that we may well be able to pull our weight together as a team," Kapil would write in his autobiography Straight From The Heart.

And against Zimbabwe, the pressure told: the wheels had come off less than an hour into the match. After deciding to bat, India's top five were all gone with the total at 17, as Peter Rawson and Kevin Curran did the early damage. And it was after this that Kapil cracked 175* off 138 balls, single-handedly taking India all the way to 266.

Quite possibly, it was the most important innings in Indian cricket history, arguably one of the finest ever in limited-overs cricket and certainly the greatest knock for which there is no footage available anywhere.

Zimbabwe had been defeated, Australia were brushed aside in a virtual quarter-final and England were eliminated in the semi-finals. Yet, no one gave India a chance in the final, as they stepped onto Lord's to take on West Indies for the third time in the tournament.

Less than two years after the 1983 World Cup triumph, another ODI crown was up for grabs - this time the World Championship of Cricket in Australia. The reigning world champions lived up to their billing with an unblemished group-stage display, earning comfortable wins over Pakistan, England and Australia, before overcoming New Zealand in their semi-final to set up a title clash with Pakistan.

Less than two weeks later, the arch-rivals were locking horns in another multi-team tournament, all the way across from Melbourne to Sharjah. Pakistan seemed headed for instant redemption when Imran Khan's stunning 6 for 14 saw India dismissed for just 125.

But Kapil - clearly the man for rainy days - wasn't giving up so easily, and with spinners Sivaramakrishnan and Shastri providing admirable company, India bowled Pakistan out for just 87. No lower total had been successfully defended in men's ODIs at the time; only once has the mark been bettered since.

Before this match, India had only ever posted 300-plus twice in ODIs, and only once in the history of ODIs had a target of 300-plus been successfully chased down.

With 65 required from the last ten overs - the match had been reduced to 48 overs each - a mini-collapse ensued, and it boiled down to three to win off the last two balls. That is when, in the fading Dhaka light, Hrishikesh Kanitkar swatted Saqlain Mushtaq for four and made himself a pop-quiz favourite for the ages.

And this one also had Kanitkar applying the final touch with a boundary.

The trophy cabinet had started to run dry post the 1998 high - after winning five out of six multi-team tournament finals in 1998 alone, India had lost nine successive finals from 1999 to 2001. There was a loss in the ICC Champions Trophy final in 2000, there were maulings to sub-continent rivals, there were tough defeats to higher-ranked teams, there were unexpected losses to lower-ranked teams it was becoming an unwanted specialty.

With this backdrop, cut to the halfway stage of the second innings at Lord's: chasing 326, India were 146 for 5 after 24 overs, Tendulkar had just walked back to the pavilion, and at the crease were two youngsters with less than 60 matches between them.

Twenty-three years on from their World Championship of Cricket triumph, India hadn't won another final in Australia. In three attempts, they had failed to take any of the best-of-three finals to even a third game. This time, they were up against an Australian outfit that might have been on their final legs, but were still three-time defending ODI world champions. India, starting their own transition, faced an early test in their three-year plan towards world domination with a new captain at the helm.

A little over three years later, and almost exactly eight years on from the day Australia demolished their World Cup dream in Johannesburg, India ended the longest reign in the history of the competition.

While they didn't quite have the same aura as earlier, this was still an Australia that hadn't lost a World Cup knockout game since 1996, and Ricky Ponting wasn't done: the Australia captain's century took his team to 260.

The vision from 2008 came to fruition in 2011. No team had won a world title on home soil until then, and the ride had been far from smooth for India: they lost to South Africa and tied with England after scoring 338 in the group stages before the aforementioned quarter-final win against Australia, and then defended 260 against Pakistan in the semi-finals.

Mahela Jayawardene's majestic 103* led a late onslaught that took Sri Lanka to 274; no team had ever chased more than 250 to win a World Cup final. And when Tendulkar exited the World Cup stage with India 31 for 2, the nerves were beginning to fray.

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India's greatest wins - From 1983 to 2011, and everything in between - ESPNcricinfo