India have now lost 14 consecutive tosses in a row, the longest such streak in ODIs – one that started with the CWC 2023 final between these two sides in Ahmedabad.

Most consecutive tosses lost by a captain in ODIs
12 – Brian Lara (West Indies, October 1998 to May 1999)
11 – Peter Borren (Netherlands, March 2011 to August 2013)
11*- Rohit Sharma (India, November 2023 to March 2025)

Teams:

Australia (Playing XI): Cooper Connolly, Travis Head, Steven Smith(c), Marnus Labuschagne, Josh Inglis(w), Alex Carey, Glenn Maxwell, Ben Dwarshuis, Nathan Ellis, Adam Zampa, Tanveer Sangha

India (Playing XI): Rohit Sharma(c), Shubman Gill, Virat Kohli, Shreyas Iyer, Axar Patel, KL Rahul(w), Hardik Pandya, Ravindra Jadeja, Mohammed Shami, Kuldeep Yadav, Varun Chakravarthy

Rohit Sharma: I was prepared to do both. When you’re in two minds, it’s better to lose the toss. We’ve played three games here and each time it had something different in it. You can’t really say this is how the pitch is going to play. The pitch keeps changing its nature. At the end of the day, you have to play good cricket and that’s what we are focused on. We’ve played good cricket in all three games and that’s what we’ll look to do now. It’s going to be challenging. The slower bowlers have come into play a lot, that’s why we wanted same team. We played a couple of days back here, we want to continue from where we left. Now that we are bowling first, we have to bowl well and try and restrict them as less as possible.

Steve Smith: We’ll have a bat. Looks a pretty dry surface, pretty dry square, we’ll like to get some runs on the board. The guys had a couple of sessions at the academy, ready to go, should be a good contest. Looks a lot drier, it should take more turn. Very good side – India – and we like coming up against them. We are looking forward to it. We’ve got two changes. Cooper Connolly comes in for Short, Tanveer Sangha comes in for Spencer Johnson