Young Indian right-arm pacer Mohammed Siraj shined on day one of the unofficial first Test of two-match series between India A and Australia A at M.Chinnaswamy Stadium (Bengaluru) as he picked up eight wickets (8/59) in the first innings of this match.

Siraj’s lethal bowling has outshone the opener Usman Khawaja’s (127 runs) brilliant century knock as Australia A was bundled out for just 243 runs while five Aussie batsmen scored the ducks.

On Sunday morning, the day one of the match, Australia A skipper Mitchell Marsh won the toss and decided to bat first. The visitors had a good start as the openers Usman Khawaja and Kurtis Patterson (31) put a superb 78-run opening partnership before their initial batting collapse began.

From 78/0, Australia A went down to 90/4 as Siraj picked up all those four wickets, including dismissing Peter Handscomb and the skipper Mitchell Marsh for the ducks.

After that, opener Khawaja and the no.6 batsman Marnus Labuschagne put another important 114-run partnership for the fifth wicket that rescued the visiting side. While Khawaja scored a brilliant century, Labuschagne also played another important innings of 60 runs (105 balls; 11 fours).

But after that partnership was broken, Australia A suffered another batting collapse and that ended their innings on just 243 runs, while once they were batting on 204/4. In that period, Michael Neser, Chris Tremain and Brendan Doggett were dismissed on ducks.

Khawaja played till the end of the innings and finally, he lost the battle after scoring 127 off 228 balls with 20 fours.

Among the India A bowlers, the 24-year-old Siraj had an outstanding dominated bowling figure of 19.3-7-59-8 while the young left-arm chinaman Kuldeep Yadav (2/63) bagged the other two wickets in that innings.

In reply, India A has a good start as they were batting on 41/0 at the stumps on the day and they were trailing by 202 runs. Openers Ravikumar Samarth (10*) and Mayank Agarwal (31*) were not out at the end of the day.