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World Test Championship final: Australia v India, day three – live | World Test Championship
41st over: India 166-6 (Rahane 32, Thakur 8) That ball goes wild! Pitches more towards a leg stump line but it careers off the seam way down leg side for four byes. Some movement. Then Boland draws a genuine edge from Thakur that flies away for four more. Undeservedly expensive over.
40th over: India 157-6 (Rahane 30, Thakur 4) Cummins from the Pavilion End, and he’s also hitting a length and getting the ball to jag in. Rahane squeezes out a single off the inside edge. Thakur rides the bounce for two, then flashes outside off and is lucky to survive.
39th over: India 154-6 (Rahane 30, Thakur 2) That is such a Boland over. Wicket second ball. Cuts it in and smashes the gloves and body from the next couple. Then has a catch dropped at third slip! A tough one, over Khawaja’s head. He goes up with the ball, gets fingertips to it but tips it over the bar. Two runs result.
WICKET! Bharat b Boland 5, India 152-6
Goodness me! What a delivery. On the other hand, it’s standard Scott Boland. He’s so good at that. Rahane takes a single to the leg side first ball, a touch too straight. That’s all you get from Boland in terms of bad deliveries. The next one hits that hard length outside off stump, jams back off the seam, cuts Bharat in half, straight through the gate, and hits middle stump. Bharat ends up squared up, leaning over, trying to figure out how that got through him. Incisive.
Scott Boland with the ball in hand. Three slips and a gully for Rahane on strike. Cover is open. Deep backward point is out, interestingly. Fine leg the other in the deep. Mid off, mid on, midwicket.
Here come the teams out to the middle.
Another perfect day here at The Oval, might be a touch warmer than yesterday, scandalously venturing towards the mid 20s on the old Celcius scale. The roller is on the pitch preparing it for India’s resumption.
Send me an email? Had some inbox problems yesterday, sorry, and couldn’t post up messages. But fingers crossed we’re all good for today.
And if you’re the kind of person who wants to know about Steve Smith’s technique and what he’s changed with it, I will go there with you.
The headline assigned to this piece might be, just the tiniest bit, overstating it.
For the detail, get yourself across the match report from The Burning One himself.
Preamble
Geoff Lemon
Hola amigos. Day three of El Championship Test Mundial, or similar, is upon us. And let us be honest, India = in strife. They lost five wickets yesterday for nowhere near enough. And it’s not like the Australians bowled the house down, but they bowled well enough at the right spots to get some assistance from the surface now and then, and that was enough. The four deliveries from the quicks that knocked over India’s main batting crew all did heaps.
So it’s that old fighter Ajinkya Rahane resuming today with wicketkeeper KS Bharat, a mere 318 runs behind Australia’s 469. But they’re only one 300-run partnership away from parity, and Australia just about had one of those too, so it’s possible. Worth finding out, hmmm?
Geoff Lemon (now) and Rob Smyth (later)
Published: 2023-06-09 09:43:11
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