22 September,2017 08:21 AM IST | Kolkata | Arup Chatterjee
Chinaman bowler Kuldeep Yadav claims hat-trick after skipper Virat Kohli scores fluent 92 as hosts demolish Australia by 50 runs to take 2-0 lead in ODI series
If this series was supposed to be about fierce rivalry and a battle among equals, it hasn't quite lived up to its billing yet. India got the better of Australia again, the 50-run victory yesterday, taking them to a 2-0 lead in the five-match ODI series.
'Chinaman' Kuldeep Yadav bagged a hat-trick, the first ODI one at the Eden Gardens since Kapil Dev's 1991 feat against Sri Lanka, but the Aussies had already been drifting towards defeat by then. Chetan Sharma is the other Indian who can boast of an ODI hat-trick.
The hosts were bowled out for 252 on the final ball of their innings, well short of where they were headed when Virat Kohli and Ajinkya Rahane were stitching together a 102-run partnership for the second wicket in 111 deliveries. Kohli fell eight short of what would have been his 31st century while Rahane made amends for his early dismissal in the series-opener with a half century.
Virat Kohli en route his solid 92 yesterday; (left) Kuldeep Yadav celebrates his hat-trick at Eden Gardens. Pics/AFP
If the Aussies saw their chances, they were pegged back by Bhuvneswar Kumar. With prodigious swing, he removed openers Hilton Cartwright and David Warner in successive overs to have the chase reeling at nine for two in the fifth over.
His opening spell was a magical - 6-2-9-2. It would've read even better had Rohit Sharma not dropped Travis Head in the slips, but he came back to take the last wicket and finish with figures of 6.1-2-9-3 Steve Smith fuelled a fight back with a fifty after Glenn Maxwell too was gone, stumped down the leg-side by a lunging MS Dhoni, but once the Aussie skipper fell, caught by a diving Ravindra Jadeja at deep mid-wicket as he failed to get hold of a Hardik Pandya bouncer, the match meandered towards a familiar finish before Yadav brought some 40,000 on the terraces to their feet.
Matthew Wade dragged one onto his stumps to become the first of Yadav's three victims.
Aston Agar, who had been preferred over Adam Zampa in the playing XI, fell leg-before next ball.
Stoinis too scored a fifty, but it was too little too late. Kohli won the toss again and Australia got their early breakthrough.
Cummins and Coulter-Nile brought their disconcerting pace but the sustained hostility, heightened by discipline in line and length in Chennai, was missing this day. It surfaced only when the two came together again, in the lengthening shadows and with each into his third spell.
As he did in Chennai, Marcus Stoinis threatened to pluck wickets with his well-directed bouncers but mistimed pulls, one each by Kohli and Rahane, that went tantalisingly close to the mid-on fielder were as close as he got.
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