India and Australia will meet again today in the second T20I at the DY Patil Sports Academy Stadium in Mumbai. It’s a quick turnaround for both teams with the first T20I being played on Friday night.
Australia won’t mind it though, as they will be looking to carry the momentum from the first game in which they came out on the right side of the result. It was a dominating win for Australia as they cruised to victory by 9 wickets in pursuit of a target of 173 runs. Dominance as a term has become synonymous with this Aussie Women’s team which has not lost a single game so far in 2022. They will be motivated to end the year with a clean sheet, which will be yet another massive achievement for them, apart from the many tangibles that they already have to show for their efforts.
India though has a lot of work to do after falling short in all three departments in some way or the other. India will require the batters to perform as one complete unit. In the first game, India managed to reach 172 thanks to some brilliant hitting by Shafali Verma, Richa Ghosh, and Deepti Sharma. 172 is a pretty good T20I score on most days but India’s poor bowling efforts required more runs in the bank. And to add to it, there was excessive dew in the second innings, making it all the more difficult for the Women in Blue.
Smriti Mandhana, Harmanpreet Kaur, Jemimah Rodrigues, and Devika Vaidya made 74 runs in total. The problem here is that they took 75 deliveries to make those runs which left too much for the others to do. India will hope that there is better intent and rotation of strike on show on Sunday.
The bowling looked extremely rusty with all the bowlers apart from Anjali Sarvani giving runs at a rate of more than 8 per over. To their credit, they did create opportunities but India’s fielding only made it easier for the visitors who made full use of the lives that they got thanks to dropped catches. Both Beth Mooney and Tahlia McGrath were dropped early in their respective innings and they made the hosts pay for it by carrying their bats. India also desperately need to find a way to stop Mooney who has a magnificent record against them, with an average of a shade under 50.
Sunday will provide India with an opportunity to make these rectifications and quickly put the hammering from Friday night. The crowd will once again be right behind the home team but the win will have to be earned, especially considering the giant opponent in front of them.
