The Indian team barely lose in test cricket at home. The main reason for this is the pitches prepared here for test matches. Indian batsmen dominate the game against spin but foreign players cannot do as well. In such a situation, BCCI prepares only friendly pitches with effect in India for test matches. The same thing happened with the Indore Test too, but here this Team India winning formula was turned on its head.
The Indian team won both of the opening matches of the 2023 Border-Gavaskar Trophy on pitches that facilitate spin. These matches held in Nagpur and Delhi could not last even three days. In view of Australia’s struggle in spin-friendly fields, the Indian team management also set up a spin track in Indore, but it turned out to be too favourable.
Indian captain Rohit Sharma won the toss and chose to bat first here. The spinners started getting a lot of help from the very first session in the Indore field. Along with the jerky bounce on the field, jerky spin also began to occur, which became very difficult for hitters to understand. Indian batsmen knew this pitch would be useful for spin, but it wasn’t expected to help that much. Sometimes the balls would stay down continuously and sometimes they would bounce a lot. Some balls spun so much that everyone along with the batter was shocked. By the time the behavior of the pitch was understood, the Indian team had lost their 5 wickets for 45 runs and then somehow managed to get to 109 runs in the first innings.
Seeing the behavior of the pitch in the first innings, Australia’s batsmen batted very cautiously. To some extent, the pitch had settled after the first session, as a result, by the end of the first day’s play, Australia had scored 156 runs, lost 4 wickets and took a 47-run lead and strengthened their position in the match. . Australia’s victory was all but decided on this first day.
Also on the second day, the behavior of the field remained the same as in the first session and the Australian team took it all out after adding 41 runs to their score. After taking an 88-run lead, the Australian team showed confidence and the Indian team seemed to be under pressure. The result was that the India team lost consecutive wickets in the second and third sessions of the second day and were down to 163 runs. Here experienced Australian spinner Nathan Lyon took 8 wickets.
After the game on the second day, the Indian team was able to give Australia a target of just 76 runs. No matter how bad the pitch conditions are, but such a low target does not encourage the bowling team, this is why Australia won the match losing just one wicket while batting fast. If this goal had been 150+, it might have been impossible to achieve in this field.
