We don’t, as a team, point fingers at each other and we don’t want to get into that mindset where we are pointing fingers at each other – that you should do this, you should do that.” So said Jasprit Bumrah on Monday, a few hours after bowling his heart out to pick up six for 76, and not long after watching his top-order batters gifting their wickets to Australia’s high-class pace attack.
Maybe you should start doing that, Jasprit. Maybe you should start pointing fingers. Maybe that will spur them into showing greater discipline, into showing greater respect and appreciation for your genius.
For the third time this series, India’s batting line-up came a cropper in the first innings. Not necessarily because Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins were unplayable, but because of their own unwillingness to put a price on their scalps. Because of their propensity to play strokes without getting set. Because of their inability to learn from the masterclass in self-denial put on by Australia’s top three.
India were bowled out for 150 in Perth, 180 in Adelaide. These are not totals that often translate to Test victories. If India still managed that result in Perth, it was thanks to Bumrah’s brilliance on which, thankfully, the batters built, for a change. India finished a stop-start Monday on 51 for four in response to the Aussies’ 445, a deep hole from which they will find it hard to extricate themselves if the weather doesn’t play ball.
A day before the third Test, Shubman Gill provided an insight into the batting group’s thinking. “We are looking to post a big total first up, this has been one of the key discussions. Each batsman will have his own game plan; collectively, we are going to try to get a big first-innings score.”
That plan should have entailed being watchful when the ball is new, because the Kookaburra is at its most dangerous when it is hard and new, when it is less than 30-35 overs old. That’s when it can climb, it can deck around, it can swing sometimes. That’s when Usman Khawaja and Nathan McSweeney and Marnus Labuschagne embraced circumspection when Rohit Sharma put them in on Saturday. That’s when India, by contrast, threw it all away, their deeds refusing to match their collective thinking.
Gill himself was culpable of a very, very poor stroke in the third over, an ugly reach-out drive to a wide ball from Starc that didn’t merit a second look. In Starc’s first over, Yashasvi Jaiswal finally managed a first-innings Test run in Australia, but not to a convincing stroke. The first delivery of the innings was slightly wide, Jaiswal went with hard hands and managed an edge that slid along the ground for four. The next was juicy, on his pads. The left-hander could have put it away anywhere, instead he unerringly picked out Mitchell Marsh at forward of square. That can happen.
But not the Gill stroke, bordering on the irresponsible and reckless with his team six for one. Prudence dictated that Gill bed in at a ground where he made 91 four years back in India’s magnificent chase of 329. The right-hander, though, played a stroke that should rankle him for a long time. A predictable catch to gully, taken smartly by Mitchell Marsh, ushered Virat Kohli to the middle with the hope that, having done all the hard yards in the nets, the virtuoso would treat the corridor outside off as a no-go zone.
Kohli’s repetitive dismissals
Sachin Tendulkar had famously done so in Sydney in 2004. In a remarkable show of denial, the master ignored every ball in the channel, ignored driving through the covers on the up because those had had his number in the three preceding Tests. The result – an extraordinary unbeaten 241, notable not for the strokes he played but the strokes he didn’t. Kohli would have been well advised to take a leaf out of his hero’s playbook, but he allowed his ambition to get the better of him.
A hopeful waft first ball that he was lucky to miss should have put him on alert, but Kohli didn’t heed the signs, flirting with a widish delivery from Hazlewood that was lapped up with glee by Alex Carey. Earlier in the year, when they sat down to plan for this tour, Australia’s quicks didn’t make fancy plans for their one-time nemesis, confident that sticking to the basics would pay dividends. Kohli didn’t disappoint them, though for his colleagues and his millions of fans, the disappointment was immeasurable. A body blow, a window to his vulnerability. It didn’t make for a pretty look.
