“It was showing a little bit of signs of up and down. If we can bat deep into tomorrow and potentially even the whole day maybe, there’s always opportunities to take 10 wickets on the final day if the wicket is a little bit up and down.
“So [the] win is still definitely in our mind, and always is pretty much. So we’ll look to do whatever we can to move towards that.”
This current Australia bowling attack, which now features its four frontliners with 300 or more Test wickets, would need some collective or individual brilliance to defend a target but whether that becomes an option will depend on the middle order.
Green has the chance to build on a promising innings and ease some of the talk around his position, which won’t be the case for Jake Weatherald and Marnus Labuschagne who remain firmly under scrutiny after loose dismissals. Green, however, was millimeters from being dismissed on 12 when an inside edge against Taskin Ahmed grazed leg stump without the force to dislodge a bail.
“You definitely need luck in cricket, that’s for sure,” Hazlewood said. “I think his intent has been good. He’s looked to score from the outset. I thought even in the first innings, it was probably just summing up the situation more so in that time, just before whatever break it was.
“I think he’s shown good intent from ball one in both innings. [He] looked to score, put the pressure back on the bowler. Yeah, a little bit of luck goes a long way sometimes. So you never know.
“We are playing on a good wicket so all we want to do is bowl in the right areas,” he said. “We have to work hard for each wicket. We had to do a lot to get those four wickets today. We are trying to give away as few runs as possible. If we can take at least three or four wickets within these [67] runs, then we won’t have a difficult target coming up.
“We want to give them as few runs as possible. They have a lot of good batters still remaining so getting at least three more wickets is our first priority. I don’t want to predict the future, but we must own the first session on day four.”












