(Cricket news) The only half-centurion in Australia’s first-innings effort against India, Tahlia McGrath, praised Pooja Vastrakar and the other bowlers for their discipline and stated that if the visitors want to win the one-off Test at Wankhede stadium, they must emulate the hosts’ disciplined ball-handling display. Despite losing a few wickets early on, Australia bounced back thanks to an 80-run partnership between McGrath and Beth Mooney.
However, when they fell quickly one after the other, India continued to strike at regular intervals, restricting Australia to 219, Vastrakar scoring 4 and Sneh Rana scoring 3. After that, India got off to a strong start at the bat, thanks to quick 40s from Shafali Varma and Smriti Mandhana, which put the home team at 98/1 against Stumps. Vastrakar was a very good bowler. She had Pez (Ellyse Perry) totally smitten with this ball.
Pooja Vastrakar bowls a relentless length that keeps you on your toes and is ideal for Test match cricket. She was getting sideways movement of the seam both sides when I was walking out to bat. She is a very gifted cricket player, and today she used her skills with discipline,” McGrath remarked. Our bowlers were only executed poorly. We were pushed aside because we were a little too wide and somewhat filled with Smriti and Shafali and other class players. As you can see, once we got our lines and lengths correct, we bowled a few maidens.
It’s a challenging wicket to score on, so we must be methodical in our planning and apply pressure, just as India did to us,” the speaker continued. While acknowledging that the Australian pacers fell short of expectations, McGrath stated that Australia will learn from Vastrakar’s bowling during the game. She was quite astute in her approach, but we weren’t getting nearly as much swing as we would have liked up front. Little things that we discussed as a bowling group that we might have missed the trick there and we were a little slow to react, like subtle adjustments that how you can hold the seam to not give too much away.
Thus, it is important to consider both what worked for her and what each of our bowlers found effective. “She delivers at the ideal length for Test cricket. It is simply unrelenting. She also has a robotic quality. She puts so much pressure on the batters, simply running in and hitting the spot repeatedly. Therefore, we had to capitalize on every opportunity she offered us to store something away. In addition, McGrath advised trying to put her off her lengths as much as possible by using our left-right combination.
While this was going on, Vastrakar discussed the value of discipline on a field that, in her opinion, was difficult to get wickets on. Observing the surface during our practise sessions, we were aware that we would need to put in a lot of effort to gain wickets on this pitch. We had to bowl wicket to wicket, hit the deck, and set up the batter, according to the bowling coach. As a result, I started throwing the occasional inswinger, which is how I got Perry.”
Vastrakar also discussed the reasons for her use of the wobbling seam versus Australia and how well it worked for her. “I tend to naturally form an outswinger to a right-hander. However, after seeing a few videos, we discovered that Australia’s batters have trouble with inward deliveries. We were attempting to get the ball to come in during practice. The players are troubled by the ball’s sharp cutback and long travel due to the wobbling seam.”
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