The Austria tour of Italy series commenced on 9th August 2021 at the Roma Cricket Club in Spinaceto. The 4-day long series constitutes 5 bilateral T20 matches to be played between the Austrian and Italian Women. The first match held on 9th August was won by the Italian team for whom this was a maiden T20I.
On the second day, 10th August, the Italy Women’s squad won the toss and elected to bat first. The opening pair of Captain Kumudu Peddrick and Dilaisha Nanayakkara showed a poor performance by not scoring a single run and not lasting for even two complete overs. Followed by their wickets, Sharon Withanage managed to pull off a meager score of 19 runs. All-rounder Dishani Samarawickrama was the only one to cross the 30-run mark and contributed 33 runs to the team score. However, she too was run-out. The rest of the line-up were able to just score single digit runs. Despite getting 29 extra runs, Italy could not even reach 100 runs. The Austrian bowlers did a fantastic job of keeping Italy under pressure despite being the chasing team. They now had to score only 99 runs to win the match. Italy on the other hand underperformed in comparison to the previous day. They were not at all able to sustain against the Austrian bowlers.
The second inning was opened by Austrian batswomen Busra Uca and Andrea-Mae Zepeda. Busra did not last long on the field and Andrea managed to score only 16 runs from 37 balls. The highest scorer in the team for the match was Captain Gandhali Bapat who pulled off 19 runs from 35 balls. Harjivan Bhullar and Mahadewa Pathirannehelage finished the match with ease on the last over’s first ball.
Austria won the match by 7 wickets and 5 balls remaining. Despite having a chasable score, none of the Austrian batswomen could even reach a score of 20 runs. Hence, Austria’s batting performance as well was not upto the mark. This showed that though Italy had performed poorly in their batting time, yet the bowlers did not give up and gave the Austrian batswomen a tough time by keeping them under considerable pressure.
The third match of the series will be held on 11th August at the same venue at 12:30pm IST.
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