The quarter-finals of 2015 ODI World Cup saw h🏅osts Australia at loggerheads with the unpredictable Pakistan side.
Batting first, Pakistan were in all sorts of trouble, finding it difficult to cope up with the pace of 🦂Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc on a juicy Adelaide pitch.
So much so that pinch-hitter Wahab Riaz had to walk in to bite🧔 the bullet against firm-favourites and the eventual winners of the tournament.
During his volatile stay at the crease, Riaz ⛄was finding it challenging to meet the ball with his willow. To which, the Australian close-in fielders with their sledges swarmed in to build a pressure-cookers situation fo꧒r the Pakistani pacer.
One of the comments made from Shane Watson at slips fired up Riaz. ‘Are you holding a bat?’ asked Watson obeying the renowned Aussie culture of sledging.
However, the left-arm fast bowler go🍎t his revenge by bowling one of the great spells in World Cup cricket. Watson received a dose of his own medicine when Riaz sledged him back during his long follow-throughs.
Riaz gave the Aussie all-rounder a mouthful as he found it a hard task to survive an unplayable spell. Had Rahat Ali not dropped the catch, Watson would have been back to the pa𒅌viౠlion.
“When he came into bat, I settled the score with him. When I was batting Watson just came up to me and said ‘are you holding a bat?’ and that was going through my mind,” Riaz was quoted as saying by Indian Today.
“I let him know that even he had a bat, but he couldn’t touch the ball,” added Riaz. Watto then steered Australia to a comfortable win as the hosts progressed to the semi-finals.