Australia vs India: With no COVID-19 cases for 40 days, Victoria Government increases crowd capacity for Boxing Day Test to 30,000 per day

Australia is in the middle of an exciting summer with team India, led by Virat Kohli, visiting the country. Six limited-overs matches (3 ODIs and 3 T20Is) were high-scoring and almost every match went down the wire. Both the teams won three matches each with India winning the T20I series. Throughout all the six matches, crowd as allowed to return and Virat Kohli cited the importance of the fans’ presence recently as well.

In more good news for the fans, Victoria Government has increased the crowd capacity for the traditional Boxing Day Test between India and Australia according to report in India Today. Earlier, they had decided to allow 25,000 fans per day for the Test match and now 30,000 will be allowed. The Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), which will host the much-awaited game, has a crowd capacity of 1 lakh.

No COVID-19 cases for 40 days in Victoria

The Victoria government took the decision after surpassing yet another COVID free day on Thursday. The state hasn’t seen a single Coronavirus case for 40 days now and is slowly returning to normalcy. The sale of tickets for general public is set to start on Friday while pre-sales of tickets for ‘Australian cricket family’.

The first of the four-match Test series is set to be commence on December 17 in Adelaide. It will be played under the lights with the pink ball with this being first day-night Test between India and Australia. Then the action will shift to Melbourne where the traditional Boxing Day Test is set to be played. Last time the two teams locked horns at the venue, India created history by taking an unassailable lead and retaining the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.

Cheteshwar Pujara had scored a century while Virat Kohli, Mayank Agarwal and Rohit Sharma had smashed half-centuries as India had amassed a mammoth score of 443/7. Australia were dismissed for 151 runs in the first innings and were then bundled out for just 261 runs in the second chasing 399 runs.

The MCG pitch has come under the scanner for the lack of bite in it for the last few years. It will be interesting to see what kind of a pitch will be on offer this time around.