Australia captain Steve Smith held a media briefing in a pre-match conference Friday for their high-stakes ICC Champions Trophy semifinal encounter, against India, here Tuesday. Acknowledging that India continued to mark their authority into the game after a string of wins, Smith offered his analysis of the impending challenge. When probed about whether Australia did have a tactic to hush the local Indian fans, much like Pat Cummins had explained back in the 2023 ODI World Cup finals, Smith replied, “Yeah, I don’t really have a message to be honest. Just going out there and playing, and hopefully, we can put on a good show.”
On whether India had an edge playing in Dubai, Smith said: “It might, I’m not too sure about it. India have played all their games here, so they have seen how the surface plays. The whole square pitch is pretty dry, and having just talked to the groundsman, it is a dry surface with a lot of traffic. As you all know quite as well, we have seen the nature of the wickets so far, and India has obviously played exceptionally well in their games. So, it’s going to be a good contest, and we are looking forward to it.”
A key problem for Australia was going to be countering India’s spin attack with particular reference to the mystery spinner Varun Chakravarthy, who had given New Zealand a lot of bother in the earlier match. Smith’s take on a possible specific plan was that spin had to be dealt with at a crucial middle-over level.
“Well! I must say the remaining spinners also had good quality, not only Chakravarthy.” So the game was won or lost by spinning, specially the way we got through middle overs.” Not forgetting the fact that it is a challenging task. “I think there is going to be some spin by the looks of it, looking at the surface. And yeah, we’ve got to counter that. So yeah, we’ll see how we do that tomorrow. We’ve got a few options of ways we can go about it so you’ll see tomorrow,” he said.
“Maybe a little bit but I think yeah, there’s been spin throughout as well So, you know, there’s different ways we can attack the game whether we want to bat or bowl first tomorrow we’ll wait and see but yeah it certainly looks a dry surface it’s going to be quite slow I imagine and take some spins so yeah I think for us as I said before playing the spinners in the middle overs is going to be crucial for us to have success in this game,” Smith said after being asked about the conditions.
The chief beneficiaries would be the spinners. The boys were also up for an examination, to see how they tackle the spin-passing phase, especially against Chakravarty. As he had observed, he too had not played much before agreeing to this format and he was very much surprised by how good the spinners are today. I think there will be slow overs; it looks dry so there’s going to be some turn for sure and that’s something we will have to counter. We’ll see how we manage that tomorrow! We have a few options going on, as far as our approach is concerned,” Smith said in reply to a question about conditions.