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On spicy MCG pitch, India fail the Hazlewood test
The visitors managed to score just 125 after being put in to bat first and Australia won comfortably
Kolkata: Abhishek Sharma shone with a 37-ball 68 but couldn’t prevent Australia from taking a 1-0 lead with a four-wicket win at the MCG on a cold Friday night.
At a capacity stadium that must have felt like home, India were completely derailed by Hazlewood’s Test length bowling on a spicy Melbourne pitch that fetched him 3/13.
India’s top order capitulated quickly but Sharma batted for all but one ball of the innings, helping them crawl to 125 all out. A late clutch of wickets from Jasprit Bumrah helped India pull things back a bit but the game was well and truly over by then, thanks to Marsh’s 26-ball 46 after opener Travis Head had set the tone of the chase with 28 off 15. Australia won in 13.2 overs, handing India their second biggest T20I defeat in terms of balls to spare.
In the bigger context of preparing for the T20 World Cup at home next February, this defeat shouldn’t sting India so much because of the massive difference of conditions in Australia.
There were quite a few positives as well. Bumrah was fantastic towards the end and Varun Chakravarthy barely conceded runs—his economy was 5.75—with his variation of pace, and India’s batting resilience despite being reduced to 49/5 was appreciable. The selection, however, might warrant a relook after Arshdeep Singh was left out of the eleven in favour of Harshit Rana who kept erring with his lengths, allowing Australia run away with the game.
Equally profligate was Kuldeep Yadav, either dropping the ball too short or too full, prompting Marsh to score 20 off four balls before finally holing out. By then, the damage had already been done. Head took on Bumrah early in the innings, surviving some close calls before muscling over mid-on to unshackle the scoring. A six off his hip quickly brought back memories of Head finding his best against India in the past, but an excellent catch by Tilak Varma on the boundary nipped his innings in the bud.
But Marsh had got his eye in at this point. With Bumrah forced to go around the wicket and conceding four byes and five wides, there was never really an asking rate pressure on Australia. Marsh used that to his advantage, pulling Rana into the second tier over deep backward square-leg before lifting Chakravarthy straight over his head and straight into the MCG sightscreen.
It was the kind of innings India needed from both ends for at least a few overs, but unfortunately no one could bring that to the table barring Sharma.
The India opener cruising to another innings with a strike rate of nearly 200 isn’t surprising. But he couldn’t get much strike, facing 37 balls out of 111 and still scoring more than half of India’s entire score. Wickets fell around him as the top-order clearly couldn’t wrap their heads around a fresh MCG pitch after being put into bat. Exploiting it to the hilt was Hazlewood, relentlessly bowling un-hittable lengths.
Shubman Gill fell for that, mistiming a loft and failing to clear Marsh at mid-off. Suryakumar then got a peach of a delivery, Hazlewood making the ball swing away to take a feather edge off his bat. Varma then tried to play an audacious swipe against the bounce, only managing a top edge. “The way he bowled in the Powerplay, if you’re four down early, it’s very difficult to recover,” said Suryakumar after the match.
Add to this the wickets of Sanju Samson and Axar Patel—run out after a mixup over a third run with Sharma—and India were looking down the barrel very early. Sharma was in another zone though, smashing Xavier Barlett for 14 runs in the second over before taking on Nathan Ellis, hammering three boundaries off him.
It wasn’t as much as the number boundaries he hit—10 in total—but the way Sharma hit them that made him look so distinctly destructive. Like how he upper cut a slower bouncer from Ellis over short third man, or how he moved inside the line to a short delivery from Mitchell Owen, pulling him fine for a boundary.
India kept losing wickets though, and Sharma had to keep adjusting his batting to his partners. It wasn’t until Rana came, scoring a vital 35 off 33 balls, that the innings finally found some direction. Sharma however still didn’t get enough strike. At one point in time, India had faced 66 balls out of which Sharma had only faced 19, but he had hit eight of them to the boundary.
