Dhoni may make India chase in third one-dayer

Josh Hazelwood will sit out the remainder of the one-day worldwide series against India after Australia opted to rest the paceman. Bowlers, Indian or Australian, hardly getting a sniff.

In this series, Rohit has already broken a couple of records.

The first two games of the ongoing series have been high scoring affairs and Hastings is expecting nothing different from the third match in Melbourne.

Hastings is unsure whether he will be picked to play in front of his home crowd but said he was pleased to have contributed in Brisbane, hopefully enough to make selectors think twice about who should make way in order for Marsh to return. Runs can be scored so fast due to the pace on the ball. Team India did really well with the bat in the first match, posting a huge total of 309-3, thanks to 171* by R Sharma. Perhaps it is a pattern and unless that pattern is broken, like the batting pattern of Australia, India needs to put pressure, bowl with discipline because it is a batsman’s game with the white ball doing little. When our batting does well, the bowlers fail us.

It’s easy to point critically to India’s finishing, but perhaps the blame can be equally shifted to the ill-disciplined bowlers and fielding lapses. It’s important to play with the proper bowling set-up.

“If you go out and you can perform the best you can, you can hold your head up”, Hastings said.

That can leave an impact on the performances, but a series victory in the offing for Australia and a must-win situation for India, none of the two fierce rivals are expected to give the other an inch. For India, none of the bowlers proved fatal as the pacers – Barinder Sran, Ishant Sharma and Umesh Yadav – were sent for the leatherhunt while the spinners Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja also failed to impress.

Rohit and Virat Kohli put together a 207-run stand for the second wicket at Perth for India that helped them reach a score of 309/3 after choosing to bat first. “Looking forward to Melbourne now”. Their batting looks settled with everyone in the top four having gotten amongst the runs and the self-belief is sky-high.

Earlier, Rohit slammed his second consecutive ton to guide India to a challenging total.

The 28-year-old said India’s failure to break the 242-run Steve Smith-George Bailey partnership for the third wicket was the reason behind their defeat. While Smith finished with 149 runs off 135 deliveries, Bailey scored 112 off 120 balls in a pivotal innings for Australia. Joel Paris and Scott Boland have still not had the kind of impact they would have hoped for, while Kane Richardson, who played in Brisbane, was at thereceivedend of Rahane and Rohit’s stick.