5th T20: India to clash with Australia at M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru
In Cricket, India will clash with Australia in the fifth and last T20 game of the five-match series at M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru today. The match will start at 7 PM Indian Standard Time.
India is currently leading the series with 3-1 and will look to register another win today.
Both teams have played 30 T20 International matches against each other till now, out of which India won 18 matches and Australia emerged victorious in 11 matches. One match ended with no result.
India and Australia find themselves on a very similar path. They’ve been on the field just four days after a draining – both physically and emotionally – ODI World Cup final and yet have had to find takeaways and tick boxes with eyes set on the next big event in less than seven months’ time.
The wounds of the final were still perhaps fresh for Suryakumar Yadav when the two teams attempted to hastily turn the page over and kick on in search of a fresh start towards glory. He said it as much: “It is difficult. It will take time. I mean it can’t be that you get up the next morning and you forget everything that happened.”
The absurdity of playing cricket so soon after such a fixture was not lost on Australia either. They afforded rest to some of their stars – as did the BCCI – while a few others were allowed to head back home midway. Mitchell Marsh, who got to skip the series, was rather vocal about the situation, while speaking to SEN radio in Australia.
“Yeah it was pretty outrageous for the guys that had to stay behind. It’s a fine line because we’ve got to respect the fact we’re playing for Australia and it’s a series against India which is always really big. But there’s also the human side of it, the boys have just won a World Cup and probably deserve to celebrate for a while and get home to their families. It’s an interesting one. You’d hope there’s not too many of those series put on after big tournaments again.”
Marsh has a point, and Suryakumar deserves a bit of empathy but this is international cricket in 2023 in a nutshell – blank slates come at you faster than you can comprehend. Sunday’s game comes without the pressures of winning the series for the two sides, and yet carries context. This will be both India and Australia’s fifth out of just 11 T20Is they play (respectively) in the lead-up to the T20 World Cup next June. And it comes right before they have to start splitting their focus with the ongoing World Test Championship cycle while figuring out the nuts and bolts of their T20I team composition.
Sunday’s game thus, isn’t a dead rubber despite being one, and that once again is international cricket in 2023 in a nutshell.
Squads:
India Squad: Yashasvi Jaiswal, Ruturaj Gaikwad, Shreyas Iyer, Suryakumar Yadav(c), Rinku Singh, Jitesh Sharma(w), Axar Patel, Deepak Chahar, Ravi Bishnoi, Avesh Khan, Mukesh Kumar, Ishan Kishan, Prasidh Krishna, Washington Sundar, Shivam Dube, Arshdeep Singh, Tilak Varma
Australia Squad: Travis Head, Josh Philippe, Ben McDermott, Aaron Hardie, Tim David, Matthew Short, Matthew Wade(w/c), Ben Dwarshuis, Chris Green, Jason Behrendorff, Tanveer Sangha, Kane Richardson, Nathan Ellis
