Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli failed to fire after India were asked to bat first by Australia captain Mitchell Marsh in the first ODI in Perth on Sunday.
In overcast conditions, Josh Hazlewood got the ball to bounce more to induce an edge off Rohit for Matt Renshaw to take the catch at second slip.
The former Indian captain hit a boundary in his 8-run knock that came off 14 balls before returning to the pavilion.
Virat Kohli walked in to loud cheers from the Perth crowd but he lasted for just 8 balls without troubling the scorers and was dismissed again fishing outside the off-stump.
Mitchell Starc pitched the ball up outside off, Kohli chased it to play a big drive away from his body, but got a thick outside edge and Cooper Connolly dived to his left at backward point to take an acrobatic catch.
Kohli, who has 5 ODI tons in Australia, registered his maiden duck (in 30 innings) in the 50-over format in the country, as Mitchell Starc became the second bowler to dismiss Virat Kohli for a duck on two instances after James Anderson across all Internationals.
Not just that, this was the first time in 30 ODI innings in Australia that Kohli has been dismissed for a duck.
For all the hype built around the comebacks of the veteran Indian stars, Rohit and Kohli fell inside the first 7 overs of the game.
The dismissal of captain Shubman Gill for 10 in the next over added to India’s misery.
The 18 runs scored between Rohit (8), Gill (10), and Kohli (0) are the lowest combined aggregate by the trio in an ODI where all three batted. The previous lowest was 25 runs against Pakistan at Pallekele in 2023, when Rohit had scored 11, Gill hit 10 and Kohli had managed just 4 runs.
18 runs by India’s top three is their lowest aggregate in an ODI since the 2019 World Cup semifinal against New Zealand in Manchester where KL Rahul (1), Rohit (1) and Virat (1) made 3 runs.
