Bancroft and Head fifties in drawn game

India A's bowlers found less help than they may have expected from a final-day pitch at the MA Chidambaram Stadium, as the first four-day game finished in a draw after they set Australia A 240 to win in 55 overs. A solid start, aided by some ordinary bowling, kept Australia A interested in the target, but a clump of wickets towards the end subdued their ambitions.

Cameron Bancroft and Travis Head made half-centuries, and added 79 for the second wicket to leave Australia A needing 125 from the last 20 overs, before falling in the space of six balls. Head nicked Abhimanyu Mithun while going hard at a fullish ball angled across him, and Bancroft pressed forward to Amit Mishra and popped a catch to silly point.

Three overs later, Naman Ojha missed a stumping off Pragyan Ojha when he spun one out of the rough and past Nic Maddinson's inside edge. This was the 39th over, and it was the first time either Ojha or Mishra had bowled from the Pavilion End. Until then, India A's frontline spinners hadn't bowled in tandem at all.

In the first innings, all nine Australian wickets taken by the bowlers had come from the other end. But the stumping chance suggested they could have bowled a spinner from the Pavilion End earlier, and Ojha gave more evidence of the help now available from there when he spun one sharply, from the line of the stumps rather than the rough, to get Peter Handscomb caught behind in the third mandatory over.

Maddinson, who had already struck Mishra and Ojha for sixes over long-on, continued playing his shots, even reverse-sweeping Ojha to the vacant point boundary. But the target was too far beyond Australia A's reach, and the players shook hands with nine mandatory overs remaining.

At tea, Australia A had been 81 for 1 in 23 overs, and 48 of those runs had come in boundaries. They had not needed to do anything outlandish to hit them; all the Indian bowlers had fed them the odd bad ball, particularly short ones, and only one of their 12 fours - Head lofting Ojha against the turn over mid-off - came off a risky stroke. India's only success had come when Usman Khawaja, looking to sweep Mishra from the rough, top-edged a catch to leg slip.

In the morning, India A added 85 runs for the loss of five wickets in the pursuit of runs that didn't come as quickly as they would have hoped, on a pitch that remained too slow for expansive shots. Against some tight Australian bowling, they only made 64 runs in the first session, at a rate of 2.29. Gurinder Sandhu continued bowling parsimonious offbreaks, using his height to extract a fair amount of bounce, and Marcus Stoinis, who had made 77 in Australia A's first innings, capped off a satisfying match with two perfect offcutters to bowl Karun Nair and Naman Ojha.