Australia last night completed what looks on paper to be a fairly comfortable victory over Sri Lanka, by the somewhat disturbing margin of 87 runs. Whether or not the result would have been different if Sri Lanka had chosen to bat first on winning the toss is something worth considering, and though Australia had their hiccups along the way with some dead patches in the batting again and some concerns about the pace of runs being conceding at certain parts their bowling, the victory gives Australia some breathing room at the halfway point of their World Cup campaign.
Aaron Finch has had a pretty interesting 12 months. He went from being a cog in the Australian batting line up in ODI’s and T20 to being a Test opening batsman and captain of Australia in both short formats of the game. It could be seen to have been a tough transition, one where the runs dried up as he tried to find a way to perform all of these roles. In the end he lost his place in the Test team and was being spoken of as being on his last couple of chances in the ODI team that he had been tasked with leading to the World Cup. Fortunately, in India and then Pakistan both he and his team clicked, and his form and his captaincy helped to create eight straight wins and confirm his place.
His century last night was the well-deserved result of his workload and presence of mind. He has been good on the field, wringing generally good bowling changes and field placements, and his innings put his team on the road to victory. His driving was superb and his running between the wickets especially with Steve Smith made the difference when runs were hard to come by. Finch has been through a lot with the upheaval in Australian cricket, and this innings and his leadership is a fitting reward.
The conundrum over Usman Khawaja and Shaun Marsh continues to linger. It is difficult to have both in the same ODI team such is their similar way of batting, and it means that at least one of them is batting out of place. Marsh’s 2018 was exceptional with multiple centuries batting at number three, while Khawaja’s first half of 2019 was just as exceptional as Finch’s opening partner. Now both are suffering from squeezing both Warner and Smith back into the team, and neither has been able to grasp the change. It seems unlikely both will be required from this point on, and whoever does miss out will feel aggrieved. Australia cannot win the World Cup without runs from whomever gets the nod in the best XI from this point on.
The issue of winning the toss and fielding has come to the fore again after last night. Sure, the wicket may be fresh, and the cloud cover may provide conditions conducive to seam bowling, but surely pitches prepared especially for ODI cricket – that are hard, fast and true – are best for batting first on and setting a target, thus placing the team batting second under pressure from the start. Is this just an old-fashioned outdated idea? That winning the toss and batting is a disadvantage? I still do not understand it, and surely Sri Lanka missed a trick again by doing so. If they had batted and scored 330, would Australia have been good enough to chase it down? India beat Australia by doing just that, batting first and setting a total that proved too hard to chase down. Australia has now benefitted from both Pakistan and Sri Lanka giving them the chance to do so.
Sri Lanka showed that Australia still doesn’t have it all their own way, with the opening partnership between Karunaratne and Kusal Perera motoring along at almost eight an over with the pace bowlers all getting a bit of tap. What was interesting was that although Starc finished with four wickets and was lauded for his pace, and Kane Richardson finished with three wickets, it was Glenn Maxwell who changed the course of the match. He started with 46 not out off 25 balls with the bat, just the kind of innings Australia wants him to play. Following up with the ball, he didn’t take a wicket (though if Finch had not burned a review nine balls earlier he most certainly would have concluded Karunaratne’ knock long before he got to 97) but he choked down the run rate and managed to drag the game back towards Australia. His 0/46 from 10 overs may not look like much on paper, but he finished with the best economy rate of all the Australians and did the job required of the number five bowler. Given that the previous captain and coach of Australia had more or less banished Maxwell from the bowling crease, it makes you wonder just what was happening in the final 12 months or so of that era of the Australian cricket team; that someone who played such an important part of the last World Cup victory with both bat and ball had been shunned to point of being excluded from all facets of the team. It also begged the question again as to why there has been no specialist spinner chosen for the past two matches for Australia, and whether they can possibly challenge for the World Cup without one.
At 2/186 off 32 overs Sri Lanka was in the game, but that old adage – ‘the pressure of runs on the board’ – eventually played its part. The loss of Karunaratne at this score took away the drive of the scoreboard, and then the loss of 4/17 from nine deliveries from Cummins and Starc drew a line through the middle order and eliminated any chance of victory. The difference here was that after the initial onslaught from the top four batsmen, Sri Lanka did not have anyone capable of continuing in the same direction to pull off a victory. This is certainly not the case with England and India who have, for instance, Jos Buttler and MS Dhoni ready to even up the run rate at these points of the innings. Here lies the danger for Australia’s fans – Sri Lanka don’t have the same firepower that those two teams do. This could well have been a different result if this match was against either of the two favourites for this World Cup.
Despite some ups and downs, Australia has gotten to the position they would have hoped for after their first five games, with only the loss to India being a sore point. They have set themselves up now as ‘almost’ certain semi-finalists, but with four games remaining, against Bangladesh, England, New Zealand and South Africa, they will have to improve further still if they are to continue on their winning ways.
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