India Salvage Some Pride With Third Place Finish

India 145-7 (Naik 28, Dhar 24no, Stalekar 3-27) beat
Australia 142 (Rolton 52) by three wickets

Women's World Cup Third/Fourth Place Play-Off, Sydney

India salvaged some pride by finishing third at the ICC Women's World Cup by beating Australia by three wickets in the third/fourth place play-off match at Bankstown Oval.

A rain-reduced match saw Australia set India 143 to win and although they reduced India to 104 for seven, an unbeaten 41-run partnership between captain Jhulan Goswami and player of the match Rumeli Dhar saw India home.

Karen Rolton top scored for Australia with 52 but only Lisa Sthalekar (30) and Alex Blackwell (19) were able to offer any sort of support with the rest of the batters registering single figure scores.

Goswami, Dhar, Gouhar Sultana and Priyanka Roy all grabbed two wickets.

India lost wickets regularly in their run chase, but had just enough in hand, Dhar unbeaten on 24 and Goswami on 18 at the close after Sulakshana Naik had made 28 early in the piece.

"We let a few overs slip through without scoring too many runs. Maybe another 20 or 30 runs would have made the difference today," Australian captain Karen Rolton said after the match.

"It's disappointing to go from number one to number four but we can't change it now. We've lost twice to India now after we had a good series against them last November. We just have to look forward now to the Twenty20 world cup and a tour to England.

"Some of our bowling probably hasn't been spot on (during the World Cup). The best we bowled was the game against England. Every now and then we probably struggled with our batting for someone to go through and get a good score. We've still got a lot of things to work on but we've got some really good players in our team who are only going to get
better.

"We've got a lot of young players and it's been pretty tough for everyone, but probably more so for them. They're only going to get better from it though."

England take on New Zealand in the final on Sunday - for more information and for details of live, unofficial audio coverage, click here.

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