The Australian team and management must be pretty disappointed after losing the second test match of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy which was played at Arun Jaitley Stadium, New Delhi, because in this match, they had upper hand for the first two days of the game.
India won the first test match by a big margin of an innings and 132 runs but in the second test match, few Aussie batters rose up to the occasion and tried to help their team in making a big score in the first innings. However, the Aussie batters failed to cross the 300-mark as the team got all-out on the score of 263 in the first innings. Nevertheless, the Australian bowlers troubled the Indian batters a lot and restricted them to 262 despite them having the home advantage.
In the second innings also, the Australians started pretty well as by the end of the day 2, they were 61/1 but tables turned upside down in the first 90 minutes of the third day. On the third day, the Aussies started from a comfortable position of 61/1 but ended up getting all out for 113 in just 90 minutes. The Indian spinner Ravindra Jadeja wreaked havoc by taking 7 wickets in the second innings of Australia and he was well supported by Ravichandran Ashwin who took the remaining 3 wickets.
As per the cricket experts and former cricketers, the biggest reason behind disastrous collapse of the Australian batting line-up in the second innings was their choice of playing sweep shots as 5 out of 9 batters lost their wickets because of sweep shots.
The senior former Aussie cricketer Allan Border had some words of advice for the current Aussie team as he spoke during an interview with a sports channel. He said that they should not read newspapers and shut down radios for next few days. Of course, they will call their friends but they should not bother about the outside noise and sit down and talk about the correct method of playing good spin bowling. He added that certainly the Aussie team must have talked about it and they need to have a method but cross-bat is definitely not a right choice, at least not at the start of the innings.
Allan Border also talked about Usman Khawaja’s innings and said that the Aussie opener batted pretty well in the first innings which included good number of reverse sweep shots but as the pitch gets lower such shots become risky. He goes on to say that the Aussies need to reassess and plan as per the situation because this is what test batting is all about. He further says that the batters need to try to settle on the crease for the first 15-20 runs and once they get accustomed to the conditions, their innings will flow smoothly.
However, the senior former Aussie cricketer also had sympathy with the Australian team because he is also not sure what the right strategy will be against such a good and quality spin bowling attack.
The third test match will start from March 1 and it will be played at Holkar stadium, Indore.