India Under-19 beat Australia Under-19 by an innings and 48 runs in the first Youth Test at Rajkot's Niranjan Shah Stadium, wrapping up the match inside three days after Lakshya Raichandani struck a career-best 240 and skipper Yashbardhan Chauhan took six wickets in Australia's second innings. It's a result that builds directly on India's 3-0 sweep of the preceding Youth ODI series, extending a dominant week for the age-group side over their Australian counterparts across formats.
Opener Raichandani, who had already made a century in the Youth ODIs, went several steps further with the bat here: 240 off 281 balls with 24 fours and four sixes, an innings multiple outlets have described as the highest score recorded by any batter in a Youth Test against Australia. He added a match-defining 124-run stand with captain Chauhan before an unbroken ninth-wicket partnership of 137 with No. 10 Mohit Ulva, who finished unbeaten on 58, pushed India's first-innings total to 494 — a lead of 277 over Australia's first-innings 217.
The other individual story of the match belonged to Australia's Blake Cattle, who scored a century in each innings — 102 in the first and a brisker 123 off 114 balls in the second — becoming only the eighth batter in Youth Test history to register a hundred in both innings of a match, and the first Australian to do so since Marcus North's 200 not out and 132 against Pakistan Under-19 in 1997. It still wasn't enough: Australia were bowled out for 229 in their second innings, with Om and Chauhan sharing all ten wickets between them and Chauhan's six-for doing the bulk of the damage, and India completed the innings victory with more than a day to spare.
India's Ishan Om had earlier taken 5 for 53 to restrict Australia to 217 in the first innings, with Mohit Ulva chipping in with three wickets, before Om and Chauhan combined to bowl Australia out again in the second innings. For Australia, seamer Kasey Barton and legspinner Spencer Green had made early inroads into India's top order on the second morning, but neither the pace nor spin options could contain the middle-and-lower-order counterattack that followed.
The result gives India a 1-0 lead in the two-match Youth Test series, with the second and final Test set for Ahmedabad from October 5-8, and it continues a pattern of the current India Under-19 batch translating white-ball form into the longer format rather than struggling with the adjustment, as sides at this level sometimes do. For both national set-ups, Youth Tests like this one are watched closely by state and international selectors — a double century against a Test-playing nation's age-group side, on top of an ODI series hundred in the same week, is the kind of write-up Raichandani's name will carry into domestic cricket conversations well beyond this tour.
More coverage of India's age-group and domestic cricket is available on SportGod's blog, with AI-powered previews on SportGod's predictions page and live scores on SportGod's live matches page.
The match result, individual figures and record claims are verified against same-day and freshly re-checked reporting, current as of September 30, 2026.
Try Sport God AI live
Live scores, AI predictions, and fantasy — free during IPL 2026.