RYAN BA­CHOO

Aus­tralia has won the World Test Cham­pi­onship!

The fi­nal day of the ICC World Test Cham­pi­onship Fi­nal 2023 saw Aus­tralia take pos­ses­sion of the cov­et­ed Test Mace af­ter they bun­dled In­dia out for 234, win­ning The Ul­ti­mate Test by 209 runs.

Travis Head was de­clared the Play­er of the Match in the WTC Fi­nal for his in­cred­i­ble 163 in the first in­nings of the game.

The morn­ing ses­sion be­gan on a se­date note with nei­ther side gain­ing as­cen­dan­cy in the first half hour of play. While Aus­tralia bowled with ac­cu­ra­cy, the overnight pair of Vi­rat Kohli and Ajinkya Ra­hane bat­ted with poise in con­di­tions that did lit­tle to chal­lenge them.

Things changed in the sev­enth over of the day, when the pin­point ac­cu­ra­cy of Scott Boland bore fruits for Aus­tralia. Boland, who had been ex­cep­tion­al through the morn­ing, beat the edge of Kohli with the first ball of the over and Aus­tralia went up to the third um­pire with a hope­ful re­view. The bat­ter sur­vived af­ter it turned out that the ball had missed the bat by some mar­gin.

How­ev­er, two balls lat­er, Boland went slight­ly full and was suc­cess­ful in in­duc­ing a thick edge from the Del­hi bat­ter’s wil­low. The ball flew to­wards sec­ond slip where Steve Smith took a bril­liant div­ing catch.

Off the fifth ball of the same over, he got all-rounder Ravin­dra Jade­ja to edge one be­hind the wick­et, where it was safe­ly held by Alex Carey. And he nar­row­ly missed out on a third wick­et in the same over, when his ex­tra bounce made the ball hit the shoul­der of KS Bharat’s bat and just flew over the slips.

These two big suc­cess­es in the very first hour en­sured that Aus­tralia dic­tat­ed the terms of play from here on. While Ra­hane and Bharat stitched a 33-run stand, the bowl­ing side didn't let up steam.

This brought suc­cess in the 57th over when Ra­hane (46) played an ex­pan­sive dri­ve against Mitchell Starc and gave a nick be­hind the wick­et. The very next over, In­dia's first-in­nings sav­iour Shardul Thakur fell lbw to the off-spin of Nathan Ly­on for a duck.

Hav­ing snuck in­to In­dia's tail, a win for the dom­i­nant Aus­tralia bowl­ing line­up seemed on­ly a func­tion of time, and they achieved the same in the 64th over of the fourth in­nings. Nathan Ly­on (4/41) and Scott Boland (3/46) were the pick of the bowlers in the sec­ond in­nings.

With this win, Aus­tralia have be­come the on­ly side in crick­et­ing his­to­ry to have won the ICC Men's Crick­et World Cup, the ICC Men's Cham­pi­ons Tro­phy, the ICC Men's T20 World Cup and now the ICC World Test Cham­pi­onship.

For In­dia, it was a sto­ry of so close yet so far, as the Asian side lost their sec­ond con­sec­u­tive WTC Fi­nal.