Australia endured a peculiar evening as they waited in hope of Bangladesh doing them a favour by beating Afghanistan. The wait and anxiety stretched into the night before eventually turning into disappointment as Afghanistan did enough to secure a win and dump the 2021 champions out of the tournament.
That it even got to a situation where their fate was at the mercy of another team was down to how clinical India turned out to be against them in a high-scoring game at St. Lucia. Australia were first hit by the Rohit Sharma storm, supported well by a collective middle-order contribution before Travis Head once again took it upon himself to stop India in their tracks. In chase of India’s 205/5, he and Mitchell Marsh kept their side on track and yet Australia eventually fell 24 runs short. Josh Hazlewood reckoned the eight overs from Jasprit Bumrah and Kuldeep Yadav proved to be the difference as usual.
“Yeah, I thought the wicket was – a pretty good wicket it was probably a 190-par score and yeah, they got the other side of it and we went underneath so I thought the chase was well on target for quite a lot of the time there and probably till Kuldeep and Jasprit, their eight overs, probably proved the difference again as they usually do,” Hazlewood said. “[We] obviously fell apart at the end but the chase was well on target for a long time there.”
Head and Marsh got Australia scoring at more than 10-an-over in the PowerPlay, after which Rohit threw the ball to Kuldeep. His two excellent overs started to tilt the game in India’s favour. He started out by conceding four in his first, and then accounting for the Australian captain in the second. It took an extraordinary single-handed effort at deep square leg from Axar Patel to send Marsh packing, after already giving him two lifelines via dropped catches. Travis Head and Glenn Maxwell vowed to keep the chase going and took a liking for Ravindra Jadeja. But Kuldeep once again put the brakes in his final over by deceiving Maxwell with a wrong ‘un that crashed onto the stumps.
Head marched on, but only till the 17th over when Bumrah came back and made a mockery of the Aussie opener with a well-disguised offcutter, which Head miscued to Rohit at cover. Even Arshdeep Singh echoed Hazlewood’s thoughts on the impact created, specially by Bumrah. In the over after Head’s dismissal, Arshdeep Singh snuffed out Matthew Wade and Tim David, to leave the tail with too much to do.
“I guess a lot of credit goes to Jassi bhai [Bumrah] because he puts a lot of pressure on the batters – he gives, what, three or four runs in an over – so batters are coming hard against me, and I just have to try and bowl my best ball and there are a lot of chances of getting wickets there,” Arshdeep said. With that double-wicket over, the left-armer took his wickets tally at the T20 World Cup to 15 – just one behind leader Fazalhaq Farooqi.
In a game that needed Australia to keep up their scoring rate to 10-an-over, Kuldeep and Bumrah conceded a combined tally of 53 in 8 overs and picked three crucial wickets to derail the chase. It was not an easy day for bowlers across the two teams, as strong winds also made control very difficult. Arshdeep revealed that having a cushion 15-20 more runs than anticipated while dealing with the wind helped in them going for wickets.
As for the wind factor, when we bowled from the end opposite to the pavilion, we got a lot of swing. From the other end, bowling against the wind… the batters were going to use the wind since the ball was travelling. So we had to look for defensive options there and not allow the wind to come into play,” Arshdeep said.
“From one end, it was very hard for the bowlers to even pitch the ball, and the ball was flying to the boundary. So having the cushion of extra 15-20 runs always helps, gives you the extra freedom of going for wickets,” he added.
