India won "The Border Gavaskar Trophy"

 

India Won the Border Gavaskar Trophy-2023

 

Indian team have finally won the most important Border Gavaskar Trophy (BGT-2023) at home by 2-1 and maintained their excellent run in this huge rivalry. With this win we have also entered into the Final of World Test Championship along with Australia. India hadn’t loss any BGT since 2014-15 series. That was the last instance where we lost this high class series. And Virat kohli had also started his captaincy from that series. After that it has happened 4 times and we have won it every time. 2017 (Home), 2018-19 & 2020-21 (Away). Now this time in 2023 (Home).

 

Building up to the Series:-

The hype for this series was unreal and the squad that Australia have selected was also very good. Many experts said that this time Australia will surely made history. Considering both team’s current form it was clearly Australia ahead of India. But beating India in India is almost near to impossible. And apart from that handling Indian spinners is itself an uphill task for any visiting side, especially from SENA countries. But considering Australia’s last BGT in India during 2017, it was expected that they will gave 100 percent fight and effort.

Before the starting of the series unfortunately Rishabh Pant met with a serious car accident and out of action for a long period of time. There was no clear idea about exactly when he will back to field. So, Indian team will surely miss the service of their best current wicket keeper batsman. Another huge blow that hurt India was Jaspreet Bumrah’s injury after the England tour in 2022. He entirely missed Asia Cup 2022, T20WC 2022 and then this BGT also. He is also going to miss the IPL 2023 and WTC Final along with Rishabh Pant.

But Indian team had to find their replacements and play with them. Bumrah’s absence was not a big problem for us as we have already an outstanding bowling attack. And with the matches are going to happen in spinning tracks we won’t miss him. But missing Pant was a huge set back. For his replacement, India never had a valid choice. We picked KS Bharat who was already travelling with team with Pant and a new entry given to Ishan Kishan considering his left handed batting and attacking approach just like pant.

Apart from these major changes, other players were same. Thankfully this time regular skipper Rohit Sharma was fully fit and available for entire series. Squad that announced for the series was quite good but our batters form was a quite headache for us. And making the combination for playing 11 was a real problem. The venues that were selected for this series were- Nagpur, Delhi, Dharamsala (Later replaced by Indore), and final one Ahmedabad. The series was from 9^th February, 2023 to 13^th March.

 

How the Series Went?

First Two Tests:-

In the first couple of tests at Nagpur and Delhi Australia looked clueless with batting. The pitches were prepared for spinners and testing of batters. But both the pitches were not Rank Turners which was anticipated by Australian Media on which Australia batters failed hugely. Indian batters, likes of Rohit, Axar, Jadeja and even Ashwin applied well on these pitches and scored valuable runs. Which eventually helped India to go 2-0 up in the series.

On the other hand Australia team got total confused regarding the pitch conditions that were over pointed out by their won media and made blunders regarding team selection. Imagine they dropped Travis Head, their best batter in recent times, how bad that was. Moreover they were already down mentally even after some extremely intense practice sessions. They practiced in Sydney by preparing spinning surfaces and choose squad accordingly.

Coming to India they don’t choose practice matches, instead of that they prepared with our local spinners, including one of them with similar kind of action to R Ashwin to counter our bowling sphere head. But hardly managed to apply that during game situation. Apart from that it was hard to understand, why the hell they brought Ashton Agar to India ahead of Matthew Kuhnemann. They benched Agar for two tests while brought Kuhnemann from Australia to straight into XI.

Talking about match situations, Nagpur was a complete dominated by India. Australia failed to score big in 1^st innings after winning the toss, but India did well with scores from Rohit, Jadeja and Axar. Rohit Sharma started the BGT with a bang for himself as well as for India by scoring a high quality hundred and that set the tone for team India. India managed to score 400 plus in 1^st innings and took a huge lead and then handed Australia innings defeat by bowling out them on just 91 runs in 2^nd innings.

While Nagpur was very one sided game, Delhi came with a little bit of fight from Australia. Australia once again won the toss and batted first. This time they were bit more attacking and proactive with their approach. They scored 263 in 1^st innings by the help of 50s from Usman Khawaja & Peter Handscomb. However managed to take lead of just 1 run. India’s lower order batters once again scored bulk amount of runs for them. Actually it was Ashwin-Axar partnership that helped India to go near that 1sr innings total.

With 62 runs lead and 9 wickets in hand Australia looked very solid at the end of day 2. Travis head who was added to the XI in this game, came as opener after Warner got injured during the match and counterattacked in that short phase of the last session on day 2. But on the next day Australia played some foolish cricket and loss all the wickets inside 50 to 55 runs and bowled out for 114 runs. India chased it quite easily with 6 wickets in hand. Just one poor session and Australia missed the opportunity to making it 1-1 in the series.

 

Last Two Tests:-

After getting 2-0 down some of the players returned back to Australia due to different reasons. David Warner got injured after 1^st two tests while Josh Hazelwood missed complete series due to injury. Ashton Agar was sent back to play domestic. But the biggest news was Pat Cummins had to go back since his Mother was not well, who sadly passed away during the series. After that he missed the remaining two tests and Steven Smith lead the team.

There was a long gap between first two tests and remaining two. Everyone thought Aussies can’t come back from this situation. Being 2-0 down in series, players getting injured and unavailable it was very difficult for them. But they had yet to qualify for WTC Final and show the World that, why they are No.1 ranked team in this format. They need someone to charge up them and Steven Smith did that role as Captain in 3^rd test at Indore.

His captaincy was spot on after losing the toss to Rohit Sharma at Indore in a rank turner. Australia bowled out India on just 109 runs, courtesy their spinner. And then India never able to get back in this match and failed in the own trap just like 2017 Pune Test. Australia took a lead of 88 runs in 1^st innings and in reply India couldn’t score enough that could have troubled Aussies in 4^th innings in this spin friendly wicket. Australia had to chase a small total, which they did quite easily.

India lost the game by 9 wickets. Back to back 3^rd game in this series ended inside 3 days and this time it was India in the receiving end. By this huge victory Australia not just qualified for WTC Final but also put India’s qualification scenario in question. Now the 4^th and final test at Ahmedabad became a must win game for India to seal the spot for WTC Final. Unless they would be depending upon New Zealand to beat or draw at least one game against Sri Lanka.

The pitch for the 4^th and final match of the series was made flat in Ahmedabad after horrible show of Indian batters in 3^rd test and Indore pitch getting poor rank. Australia won the toss and choose batting and batted almost for two days and scored 480 runs. Same thing was done by Indian side also. We made 571 runs, after which there was no enough time left to get a result from the match, which resulted a draw in the game. Few batters, Usman Khawaja with Cameron Green from Australia and Shubman Gill with Virat Kohli from India scored centuries in this test.

Everyone’s innings was special, but Virat getting a test 100 after almost 3 years, his 28^th test ton, overall 75^th was the thing to remember from this test. Other than that it was a bizarre end to this wonderful series. At the end India won it by 2-1, maintaining the same score line of last 3 BGTs. This was 4^th back to back series win for India against Australia, which shows the dominance level of our team in BGT despite being so exciting and fighting matches.

One classic battle to watch out:-

After all the efforts put on by both the teams throughout this 2^nd WTC Cycle for almost about 2 years, now the time has finally came to get the best among these two. For which we will have to wait for another 2 to 3 months. June 7^th to 11^th is the deadline and Oval is the final destination. Both Indian and Australian side will be really excited for it, as they are going to play an ICC Final after 2003. As per the conditions Aussies will be favorites, but considering India’s domination over them in recent years India will be a tough challenge for them. So, eagerly waiting for that moment.