A record number of 17 wickets fell on day 1 of the opening Border Gavaskar Trophy Test at the Optus Stadium in Perth, making it the highest tally of wickets to fall on the opening day of a Test in Australia.
With Australian bowlers led by Josh Hazlewood restricting India to a first innings total of 150 runs followed by the Indian bowling unit seeing Australia tottering at 67 for 7, pacer Mitchell Starc had backed the bowlers on being asked about batting conditions across Australia becoming harder.
“How many ways can one skin a cat? Bowlers are allowed to bowl good balls. When there’s a lot of runs, it’s like, ‘Oh, the bowlers bowled badly. When there’s wickets, the wickets are tough.’ (But) you are allowed to bowl good balls and maybe credit should go to both teams and bowlers. Sure, there’s plenty in the wicket when you put it in the right area and it was hard work for batting, but as I said, you’re allowed to bowl good balls and there were plenty of those today,” said Starc who had the bowling figures of 2 for 14 including the key wickets of Yashasvi Jaiswal and KL Rahul.
With Indian skipper Jasprit Bumrah winning the toss and opting to bat first on what seemed to be a bouncy Perth wicket, most of the Indian batters including Virat Kohli struggled against the Australian pace attack of Starc, Hazlewood and Pat Cummins.
Starc thought the Perth wicket was a hard-ball wicket. “I think there was a fair bit of good bowling today. Obviously, there was enough in the wicket and it probably felt like it was a hardball wicket. When the ball started to get a little bit softer towards the back end of that Indian innings, it probably didn’t do as much. (There was) still enough there, but it didn’t do as much as the brand new hardball. So I guess that’s something for teams to take in the second innings,” said Starc.
The pacer also termed the Perth outfield as a slow outfield. “If you can get through the testing period, it does get slightly easier. That being said, the outfield is quite slow, so that probably made runs a bit hard to come by. That’s probably the slowest outfield we’ve seen over in the west for a long time,” said Starc.
