It’s Republic Day tomorrow, a national holiday in India, and that’s why the Indian cricket team can scarcely afford to lose against Australia on this day. The humiliation of letting down an entire nation of 1.3 billion cricket fans would be too much to bear.
Apart from that, there are only two matches left in this series for the Indian cricket team and they really need to get a win under the belt. Otherwise, the morale of the entire team would be completely down by the time the World Cup begins in February.
Clearly, nothing about the Indian team is clicking and captain M S Dhoni looks increasingly like the skipper of a Titanic that has just hit an iceberg. It certainly does not make for a pretty sight.
And yet, Dhoni continues to make excuses for his team. In spite of the several heavy defeats, he still claims to have his best eleven in Australian conditions. Dhoni said in an interview, “We were playing the best XI. We were bothered by injuries. As I said earlier, experimentation is a word that’s banned. You can use all the different words but we don’t experiment, we feature the best XI.”
The big problem India face is that the bowling is completely pedestrian, more befitting of a team such as Bangladesh or Ireland, rather than a cricketing world power such as India. The batting too, has been subpar, as nothing Dhoni can say could possibly justify the entire team getting all out for just 150 runs against England in the last match.
Australia are in a good space of mind and the aggressive captain George Bailey is back, after a brief one match suspension for slow over rate. Bailey says, “I think one of our great strengths throughout the tournament [World Cup] is going to be our flexibility. I think we’ve seen that already, sometimes through necessity, but just having the flexibility to be able to bring X [Doherty] when it’s appropriate, use different quicks in games, use different quicks at different stages of the game.”
India will be without the injured Rohit Sharma for this match, so Shikhar Dhawan gets another chance to justify his selection – something he has failed to do so far. Australia will make just one chance, with David Warner coming back. He will be taking Shaun Marsh’s place in the team.
Team news
Australia: 1 Aaron Finch, 2 David Warner, 3 George Bailey (capt.), 4 Steven Smith, 5 Glenn Maxwell, 6 Mitchell Marsh/Gurinder Sandhu 7 Brad Haddin (wk), 8 James Faulkner, 9 Mitchell Starc, 10 Josh Hazlewood, 11 Xavier Doherty
India: 1 Ajinkya Rahane, 2 Shikhar Dhawan, 3 Ambati Rayudu, 4 Virat Kohli, 5 Suresh Raina, 6 MS Dhoni (capt. & wk), 7 Axar Patel, 8 Stuart Binny/ R Ashwin, 9 Bhuvneshwar Kumar, 10 & 11 Two out of Ishant Sharma, Umesh Yadav and Mohammed Shami
Match conditions
The Sydney pitch has always been a dry one and excellent for spin bowlers. But it’s likely to rain tomorrow, so we may have a curtailed match. Batsmen should have a good game and we should have a high scoring match, provided the Indian team bats to its potential.
Watch India take on Australia live on Star Sports at 8:50 AM on Monday, 26th January. We wish all our readers in India a Happy Republic Day!
