India and Australia played each other on the first day of the 2023 World Test Championship final (WTC) at the Oval in London. India got off to a great start when they chose to bowl first and Usman Khawaja was out for a duck.
Also, Marnus Labuschagne and David Warner looked like they were in a good groove, but neither of them had much of an effect on the game. Labuschagne only got 26 runs before Mohammed Shami got rid of him. Warner, on the other hand, got 43 runs before he under-edged the ball right into wicketkeeper KS Bharat’s hands.
But after losing three wickets for only 76 runs, the Aussies made a strong comeback in the game thanks to great knocks from senior batter Steve Smith and young batter Travis Head. At the end of the day, Smith had scored 95 runs on 227 balls and Head had scored 146 runs on 156 balls. Neither player had been out.
At the end of Day 1, Australia was doing well, with 327 runs and three wickets lost. Even though Umesh Yadav, Ravindra Jadeja, Shardul Thakur, Mohammed Shami, and Mohammed Siraj had some early successes, they were not able to make a permanent difference.
Sunil Gavaskar, a former Indian bowler, came to the front to give his opinion on how the team was doing with the ball. Gavaskar thought that by the end of the last practice, the Indian team looked really tired and down.
“In the last period, India looked tired. They looked down on themselves. “They are looking at 550–600 with Travis Head on 146 and Steve Smith on 95,” Sunil Gavaskar told Star Sports.
As Day 2 of the WTC final gets closer, India will want to get some early wins so they can make their long-awaited comeback in the game. It could be very important to break the relationship between Head and Smith early in the day, or else Australia could be on its way to a big first-inning score.