All-round Australia levelled the three-match T20 series against the Indian women's cricket team in the second game at Navi Mumbai's DY Patil Stadium with an all-round performance with both bat and ball. Australia restricted India to a modest total of 130 after choosing to bowl first while chasing it down with an over to spare as the series now stands at 1-1 with the finale to be played on Tuesday, January 9.
Wickets at regular intervals, that's how India's innings could be explained in a nutshell. When it looked like a partnership started building, the Australian team would hit back with a breakthrough. Several batters including Smriti Mandhana, Richa Ghosh and Jemimah Rodrigues got starts but no one stayed for long and converted into a big one. Deepti Sharma scored the most (30) but since the wickets were falling around her, she had to protest her wicket and attack calculatively.
Georgia Wareham stood out with the figures of 2/17 with Annabel Sutherland and Kim Garth also picking up two wickets each. 131 was never going to be a challenging target and Australian openers started in sound fashion. The duo of Alyssa Healy and Beth Mooney got through the powerplay unscathed before Deepti struck in her consecutive overs to send them both back.
India had made a little comeback but they knew that they needed to get regular wickets given the length of the Australian batting line-up and that the total they were defending was not a huge one. Even though the Australian batters also got starts and got out, they weren't worried since the total wasn't that huge. India did pick a couple of more wickets but Ellyse Perry with an unbeaten 32 and Phoebe Litchfield with an unbeaten 18 helped Australia get home.
India did extremely well in the series opener and will hope for a better show from their batters given that none of them played a big innings, something that Shafali Verma did in the last game.
