India pursuit of the objective was hindered early on when starter Ruturaj Gaikwad was out before the ball was even touched.
Australia set a challenging goal of 208 runs in 20 overs in the opening game of the five-game Twenty20 International series at the Dr. Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy ACA-VDCA Cricket Stadium in Visakhapatnam. With 110 runs in 50 balls, Josh Inglis had an incredible inning, and Steven Smith chipped in with 52 runs. Tim David’s late hits increased Australia’s total.
But India got back into the game thanks to a masterful 112-run partnership between captain Suryakumar Yadav and Ishan Kishan. Rinku Singh’s fast 28 off 14 balls and Suryakumar Yadav’s outstanding 80 runs off 42 balls gave India a dramatic two-wicket victory.
India’s now leads the series 1-0 thanks to this victory.
Losing skipper Matthew Wade said:
It was a good match in the end. Inglis got us a score we thought we could defend but the Indians came hard at us. These young Indians play a lot of IPL and T20 cricket. Thought we bowled pretty well, just couldn’t nail our yorkers, easier said than done especially on a small ground like this. Lot of positives to take out from this game. Inglis was class. We thought we did fairly well, Ellis bowled a big over for us to take it into the final over, it went down to the last ball so it shows how close it was.
Winning skipper & POTM, Suryakumar Yadav said:
I think bowlers did a great job, we were put under pressure, but credit to Mukesh for the way he bowled, the wicket wasn’t easy to bowl on, but to go at less then 9 rpo was outstanding, Rinku as well, playing at the early stage of his career and playing that kind of innings, it was special. We didn’t want to put too much pressure on the later batters, credit to Surya bhai, he planned his innings superbly, he can always play the big shots whenever needed.
The plan was to get quick runs (on the partnership), so even if I got out, we needed the runs on the board. The ball I got out, he wanted me to look for a single, but the gap between runs required and balls left was big and I had to go for my shots. It’s a young side, most of them have not played against big teams like this, we’ll make mistakes, we’ll talk about it during the team meetings and come back better with the ball in the next match.
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