Melbourne: The chance to gain a critical mental edge ahead of the T20 World Cup will be on offer when Australia and India meet in Wednesday’s CommBank Tri-Series final in Melbourne.
Just eight days later, the teams will meet again, with the stakes to be much, much higher in the opening match of the ICC tournament at Sydney’s Showgrounds Stadium.Surprisingly, given Australia’s No.1 ranking and recent success, India actually head into Wednesday’s game at Junction Oval with the better record in recent contests between the two teams.
Harmanpreet Kaur’s team inflicted Australia’s only defeat of the last T20 World Cup in the West Indies, a 48-run group stage defeat in Guyana, while they also picked up a seven-wicket tri-series victory over the world’s top-ranked team last Saturday. But Australia will draw confidence from a dominant display with the ball when the sides met earlier in the series in Canberra, when Ellyse Perry and Tayla Vlaeminck fired to district India to 9-103.
“I enjoy facing the Indians, they’re a fantastic outfit and they’ve done us a few times over the last little bit,” Australia wicketkeeper-batter Alyssa Healy told cricket.com.au.
“So it would be nice for us to get out there and put a good performance on the board and show them what we’ve got.”
While winning the tri-series would be a confidence booster for Australia, who have struggled to build momentum with two wins and two defeats from their four matches to date, they will also be wary of playing all their cards too early. In the eyes of left-arm spinner Jess Jonassen, the most important thing for Australia will be improving on the areas that cost them in last Saturday’s match, rather than focusing too much on next week’s World Cup opener.
“This series has been about trying things and trying to work on different match-ups and combinations,” Jonassen said.
“The main thing for us is making sure we can bounce back from the previous game against them, where we batted fairly well but we would have liked to have finished a bit better, and then we didn’t bowl as well as we would have liked, either.” She added. (Agencies)
