Daijiworld Media Network
Melbourne, Jan 17 : Smith spoke about starting well with the ball. They did start well in the first two ODIs as Dhawan only managed single-digit scores. He is under a lot of pressure. Well, as said earlier, the last time he walked out to bat at the MCG, he scored a hundred. Probably he can take confidence from that. Australia's worry would be that they have not been able to make inroads in the middle overs. India have their problem of not exactly knowing when is the right time to accelerate after a period of consolidation. A lot of things to look forward to on this exciting Sunday.
So two debutants for India. Gurkeerat and Rishi Dhawan become the 208th and 209th players respectively to represent India in the ODI format. By the way, here's some great news to all the Indian fans. After South Africa's crushing loss yesterday in Johannesburg, India have regained the No. 1 spot in the Test rankings.
Australia have won the toss and have opted to field
Dhoni: 'We were anyway going to bat first. Looking at the conditions and how the Australians have batted, we have made two changes. Gurkeerat and Rishi Dhawan will be making their debuts and they replace Manish Pandey and Ashwin. Rishi is a bit of an all-rounder. He can bowl seam-up and do a bit of lower-order batting. Gurkeerat is a batsman who can bowl a bit of off-spin.
It also gives me that extra part-timer, which makes the bowling look slightly better. We need to capitalise more in the second half of the batting. With the ball, we need to do better and not give too many boundary balls.'
Smith: 'We will bowl. We have been chasing quite well and the wicket here looks quite dry and I think it will get better under the lights. Hopefully, we'll do well with the ball today. We have been batting very well. He (Rohit) is batting extremely well. Mitchell Marsh is back for Joel Paris.'
Teams:
India (Playing XI): Shikhar Dhawan, Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, Ajinkya Rahane, MS Dhoni(w/c), Gurkeerat Singh Mann, Ravindra Jadeja, Rishi Dhawan, Umesh Yadav, Ishant Sharma, Barinder Sran
Australia (Playing XI): Aaron Finch, Shaun Marsh, Steven Smith(c), George Bailey, Glenn Maxwell, Mitchell Marsh, Matthew Wade(w), James Faulkner, John Hastings, Scott Boland, Kane Richardson