At the end of day 4 of ongoing Adelaide Test, the hosts Australia is hugely under pressure against the visitors India. However, the off-spinner Nathan Lyon believes that they can still win this Test.
Despite having a good start in this first Test of the series, Australia has lost their grip in this game with the time progresses. Now, the hosts have to chase a tough fourth innings target of 323 runs and that too against one of best bowling sides at present.
The hosts have the very shaky performances from the beginning of the fourth innings. The opener Aaron Finch (11) failed to count his early luck that he got on the very second ball of the innings when Ishant Sharma’s front-foot no-ball rescued him to lose his wicket through the lbw.
The debutant opener Marcus Harris was caught behind after scoring 26 runs. Usman Khawaja and Peter Handscomb also lost their wickets quickly on just 8 and 14 runs respectively. Shaun Marsh remained unbeaten on 31 runs off 92 balls (3 fours) while Travis Head was not out on 11 runs off 37 balls (1 four) and they finished the day with the unbroken 20-run partnership for the fifth wicket as Australia was battling on 104/4. The hosts still need to score 219 runs to win this game while India is looking for their first Test victory in Australia since January 2008 as they need to take six more wickets.
However, Australian off-spinner Nathan Lyon, who picked up six wickets (6/122) in the second innings, believes that Australia has still chance to win this match if their first hour goes well with simple cricket.
The Aussie off-spinner said, “We definitely still believe we can win this. It’s just about coming out tomorrow, winning the first ball, the first over, the first hour. Just simple cricket, we need to not complicate things and just go out there and enjoy ourselves and compete hard and fight our backsides off.”
Earlier on the day four, the Indian cricketers Cheteshwar Pujara (71) and Ajinkya Rahane (70) provided an important 87-run partnership for the fourth wicket that helped the visitors to set a 300+ target for the hosts.
However, the Indian lower batting failed massively as it just added four runs for the last four wickets and India was suddenly wrapped up from 303/6 to 307/10. Aussie off-spinner Lyon picked up six wickets in that innings as he had a bowling figure of 42-7-122-6.
