Aaron Finch, playing his 100th ODI, won the toss for Australia and elected to bat first on a wicket that seems to be good for batting.
“We will bat first. It looks like a dry wicket. Hopefully, we can post a big score,” said the Australian skipper at the toss. “We want to keep improving all the time. We have made good ground in ODIs in the last 4-5 months. We have made very good progress. Alex Carey comes in our team, Jhye Richardson misses out.”
The big change for India, on the other hand, was that are resting Yuzvendra Chahal. India captain Virat Kohli wasn’t too perturbed by Australia’s decision to bat first as they would have chosen to chase as well.
“We have done well chasing a lot in ODIs. And we wanted to back our strengths. This surface is going to be hard and it will be good to bat on,” said Kohli. “We want to continue what we did in New Zealand and Austrlia. Our intensity was top-notch and that’s exactly we need here. A couple of things we need to work on in our middle-order. We want to up the scoring rate more in the middle overs. We are pretty balanced as a side.
Kohli added: “We are not playing two wristies today. We are giving Chahal a break today so Jadeja comes in. We would rotate our wrist spinners. Rest we have the same combination of 2 fast bowlers, Vijay Shankar and Ravindra Jadeja to provide us balance and give us depth in batting. Our top-order is same as we played in New Zealand.”
Mohammed Shami is back in the squad after a short break and it will be interesting to see how he shapes up.
Teams:
Australia (Playing XI): Aaron Finch(c), Usman Khawaja, Marcus Stoinis, Peter Handscomb, Glenn Maxwell, Ashton Turner, Alex Carey(w), Nathan Coulter-Nile, Pat Cummins, Adam Zampa, Jason Behrendorff.
India (Playing XI): Rohit Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan, Virat Kohli(c), Ambati Rayudu, MS Dhoni(w), Kedar Jadhav, Vijay Shankar, Ravindra Jadeja, Kuldeep Yadav, Mohammed Shami, Jasprit Bumrah.