Indian captain Rohit Sharma admitted they didn’t bowl well against Australia in the first T20I at the IS Bindra Stadium, Mohali on Tuesday after losing by four wickets. India posted a par score of 208 after they were put into bat by Australian captain Aaron Finch.
KL Rahul and Hardik Pandya scored 55 and 71 runs respectively to help their team surpass the 200-run mark while Suryakumar Yadav also contributed with 46 runs.
However, Australia got off to a flying start as Aaron Finch and Cameron Green took the attack on the Indian bowlers in the Powerplay overs. Finch scored 22 runs off 13 balls while Green impressed in his second T20I outing.
Green also had the rub of the green on his side as India decided to not take an LBW review when he was on 17 and the ball was hitting the stumps. Furthermore, he got another life when Axar Patel dropped a simple catch when the right-hander was on 42. Green went on to make 61 runs from 30 balls and his drop chances cost the hosts big.
Moreover, Steven Smith’s catch was also dropped by KL Rahul when the right-hander was on 19. On the other hand, India’s death bowling was once again an issue as Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Harshal Patel were taken for runs in the final overs.
Kumar was taken for 16 runs in the penultimate over whereas Patel conceded 22 runs in the 18th over he bowled. Bhuvneshwar conceded a total of 52 runs in his four overs whereas Harshal gave away 49 runs.
Rohit Sharma said in the post-match presentation, “I don’t think we bowled well. 200 is a good score to defend, and we didn’t take our chances in the field. It was a great effort from our batters, but bowlers were not quite there. There are things we need to look at, but it was a great game for us to understand what went wrong. We know this is a high-scoring ground. You can’t relax even if you get 200. We took wickets to an extent, but they played really well. They played some extraordinary shots. If I was in that changing room, I would expect to chase that total. You can back yourself to defend 60 runs in the final 4 overs. We were not able to take that extra wicket. That was the turning point, if we would have taken another wicket, things would have been different. You can’t score 200 everyday, you need to bat well. Hardik batted really well to get us there. We need to look at our bowling before the next game.”
India and Australia will play the second T20I on Friday at Nagpur.
