Twitter Reactions: Usman Khawaja gives a headache to the management with a fine 89

The return of Steve Smith and David Warner has tightened up things for Australia giving the captain and the management several headaches. While they managed to pass the squad selection hurdle, team combination is going to be another major concern. Usman Khawaja has relished the opener’s spot and has performed quite consistently at this spot for a while now. Even in the warm-up game against Sri Lanka, he scored a fine 89 and put his team on the top.

At the same time, Aaron Finch hasn’t done much wrong either and was brilliant in the UAE a few weeks ago. With Steve Smith and Shaun Marsh also doing well, picking the right batting line-up is going to get extremely difficult. There weren’t any doubts about Australia’s domination in the game against the Lankans. The side has struggled for a while now and it was no different this time either.

The Asian team won the toss and opted to bat first. However, their batting concerns were evident yet again. Lahiru Thirimanne and Dhananjaya de Silva were the top scorers for the side with 56 and 43 respectively. Most of the other batsmen got off to starts but couldn’t carry on for long. Every bowler who has handed the ball, except Marcus Stoinis picked up at least one wicket. Even Steve Smith managed to dismiss Angelo Mathews as Sri Lanka scored 239/8 in 50 overs.

Usman Khawaja fights hard to cement his opening position

Australia lost the wicket of skipper Aaron Finch early in the chase. Nuwan Pradeep trapped him LBW for 11 runs. Shaun Marsh, Glenn Maxwell and Marcus Stoinis – all got into the thirties but couldn’t kick along and put up a big score. It was Usman Khawaja all the way through for Australia but fell 11 runs short of what otherwise should’ve been a great ton. Yet, the team managed to register a comfortable 5-wicket win and achieved all the targets set for this game as well.

Twitterati was glad that Australia did it again without much help from Warner and Smith. They have termed this Australian side one of the hot favourites to win the tournament and think Khawaja should be one of the openers. Also, the fans were delighted to see Mitchell Starc bowl after a long while.

Here’s how Twitter reacted: