Vijay Shankar picked up a brilliant catch. (Source: AP)India allrounder Vijay Shankar took a brilliant catch in the deep to help Kuldeep Yadav pick up the wicket of Usman Khawaja in the first one-day international (ODI) at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium, Hyderabad on Saturday.
Good catch from Vijay Shankar.https://t.co/dYO4YkhChQ
— Gautam chauhan (@Gautamchauhan2) 2 March 2019
The incident happened in the final ball of the 24th overs when Khawaja danced down the track to Yadav and then decided to hit it in the air with the spin over mid-wicket. The left-hander made decent contact with his uppish flick but got the placement wrong. Vijay Shankar ran to his right at deep mid-wicket and slid to complete a very good catch. It was a complete gifted of a wicket by Khwaja as he departed after notching up a fine half-century.
“Vijay Shankar’s wicket, more than Kuldeep Yadav’s wicket,” says Sunil Gavaskar on air.
Earlier, Australia won the toss and opted to bat first. Explaining his decision, skipper Aaron Finch said, “It looks like a dry wicket. Hopefully, we can post a big score. We want to keep improving all the time. We have made good ground in ODIs in the last 4-5 months. We have made very good progress. Alex Carey comes in, Jhye Richardson misses out.”
Meanwhile, India captain Virat Kohli said that he would have bowled first. “We have done well chasing a lot in ODIs. And we wanted to back our strengths. This surface is going to be hard and it will be good to bat on. We want to continue what we did in New Zealand and Australia.”
“A couple of things we need to work on in our middle-order. We want to up the scoring rate more in the middle overs. We are pretty balanced as a side. We are giving Chahal a break today so Jadeja comes in. We will rotate our wrist spinners,” he said.
“Rest, we have the same combination of 2 fast bowlers, Vijay Shankar and Ravindra Jadeja to provide us the balance and give us depth in batting. Our top-order is same as we played in New Zealand,” he concluded.
