Australia captain Steve Smith elected to bat first after winning the toss against India in the first semi-final of the ICC Champions Trophy 2025 at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium. India stuck to their winning team, but Australia brought in two changes, including Cooper Connolly replacing Matt Short and Tanveer Sangha replacing Spencer Johnson.
The toss outcome also set an undesirable record for India, their 14th straight ODI loss since the 2023 World Cup final. Rohit Sharma, the Indian skipper, has lost 11 straight tosses, the second-longest losing sequence for an ODI captain.
The probability of losing 14 consecutive tosses is 1 in 16,384 or 0.000061%. 🤯
– Craziest toss luck for India. pic.twitter.com/jRqtdKWjbS
— Mufaddal Vohra (@mufaddal_vohra) March 4, 2025
14 consecutive toss losses. The probability of losing 14 tosses in a row is, 1/16,384 this means it happens once in 16,384 trials on average.#INDvsAUS #RohitSharma𓃵 #ViratKohli pic.twitter.com/8jDspohZOU
— Cric8fan (@cric8_official_) March 4, 2025
14 CONSECUTIVE TOSSES LOSS…😭 #INDvsAUS pic.twitter.com/XC5FNV4ZCQ
— Polcrien News (@AD_RAJPUT777) March 4, 2025
Phirse Toss haar gaye 😭😭😭😭
14th in a row 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/BXk5shEFUO— SoN! 🦋💫 || Ignore & Fly 🥂🦋 (@fanatic_devil16) March 4, 2025
Smith, justifying his choice to bat first, pointed towards the conditions conducive to spinners. “We’ll have a bat. It’s a very dry looking surface. The boys had a couple of sessions, set to go. It should turn. Very good side – India. Two changes. Cooper Connolly in place of Short, Sangha in place of Johnson,” he declared at the toss.
Connolly, playing his Champions Trophy debut, is the fourth-youngest Australian to play for the team in an ICC ODI tournament. The 20-year-old has played three ODIs before during Australia’s tour of Sri Lanka earlier this year.
India, on the other hand, opted to maintain their winning combination by keeping spinner Varun Chakravarthy over pacer Harshit Rana. Rohit Sharma, even after losing yet another toss, was positive about his team’s performance. I was ready to do both. When you are uncertain, it’s preferable to lose the toss. The pitch keeps altering its character. You need to play good cricket. We’ve played good cricket in all three matches and that’s what we’ll attempt to do. It will be tough. We are playing with the same side. We want to carry on from where we stopped.”. With us bowling first, we need to bowl well and keep them to as few as possible,” he added.
The high-profile semi-final will be a hard-fought encounter, with both sides looking for a place in the final of the highly rated ICC tournament.
