4 min readJun 11, 2026 07:58 PM IST When Nikhli Chaudhary got stuck in Australia during COVID-19, little did he or his family back home in Punjab know that the inconvenience would eventually result in him getting called up for the Aussie T20 side in just over six years time. A former teammate of Shubman Gill, Abhishek Sharma and Harbhajan Singh in the state side, Nikhil travelled to Australia’s Townsville in March 2020 for a friend’s birthday, just before borders were closed. Now, the 30-year-old has a chance to become only the third India-born cricketer to have played for Australia, following in the footsteps of Rex Sellers and Lisa Sthalekar. “When Nikhil decided to play club cricket in Australia months after he was struck there, I was a bit displeased. He had played for Punjab and wanted to don the Indian jersey one day. But he saw himself growing as a professional cricketer there,” his father Sneh Kumar Chaudhary told The Indian Express on Thursday. “Right from his childhood, he was an admirer of the …