Australia defeat India by five wickets in second ODI
The game appeared fairly evenly poised at the innings break, but Australia’s aggressive batting broke the back of this chase early on and put India on the back foot, a position they weren’t able to recover from. Despite getting the early wicket of Healy, India weren’t able to press that advantage and couldn’t slow the pace of Litchfield and Voll, who put on a huge partnership to ensure that even after they lost their wickets, the job was pretty well done for their team.
India didn’t bat too badly, but they couldn’t continue the momentum they built through a good opening partnership to keep the runs flowing after losing those wickets. Both Pratika and Harmanpreet’s half centuries were achieved at a glacial pace in hindsight when compared to Litchfield and Voll. It will hopefully be a lesson to India on strike rates required to match it with this Australian team at their best.
For Australia, they will have some areas they want to work on in terms of finding wickets early in the innings and there will be some disappointment about those late wickets they lost. However, it was a dominant win for them and they will be very pleased with the result and the batting of their two young stars in Litchfield and Voll.
Australia have secured the ODI portion of the series with that win and have pulled ahead in the multi-format series, so India will be pushing hard to level the series again by getting a win on Sunday – a game which will also be played in Hobart – before the teams move to Perth for the Test next week.
Thanks so much for joining us tonight. We’ll be back on the OBO for the final ODI on Sunday – hope to see you then!
Updated
Player of the Match: Georgia Voll
No surprises with this one, Voll made her second ODI century tonight and was superb for Australia. She speaks with so much joy on her face about her partnership with close friend Litchfield.
“We keep things pretty simple to be honest,” she said. “She was smashing them down the other end and I took a little while to get going. Once I started feeling the ball nicely I could expand my game a little bit and similar with her. Obviously we complement each other quite well and we just love batting together.”
