Years of planning. Years of forethought, deliberation, anticipation. All unravelled in less than 33 overs of a slightly extended session, Australia bowled out for 91 and losing the first Test at Nagpur before tea on the third day.
At the top of Australian cricket, this tour has been on minds for an age. The 2013 men’s team came for four Tests in India and lost the lot. The humiliation stung. There was much thinking and theorising before the next attempt in 2017. Steve Smith made three hundreds, Steve O’Keefe pulled out a singular performance, Nathan Lyon had his best innings return and Australia closed the gap to a 2-1 loss.
That gave two points of reference, but a coincidence is easily misread as a sequence. Graph a line between them and it did show improvement. From then, there were A tours, spin camps, roughed-up practice wickets. Progress in Pakistan, then in Sri Lanka.
Which meant the 2023 tour, the next point in the India dataset, was supposed to be another step towards parity. Seven players in the XI in Nagpur were also there in 2017. Those who weren’t – Todd Murphy, Marnus Labuschagne, Scott Boland and Alex Carey – were some of the strongest performers in the six years since.
But the illusory sequence came to an end. Really that happened on the first day, when Australia’s first innings crashed to 177. Smith and Labuschagne had a partnership, Handscomb and Carey had a partnership, neither lasted for long enough, and nobody else did anything. It was a patent example of insufficiency.
Missed chances and elusive opportunities while bowling attracted attention, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered had India’s lead of 223 been a hundred runs fewer. Australia had no way of playing India’s contrasting finger spinners, Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja, regardless of what day of the match it was or what condition the pitch was in.
Each plan about how to prosper in India over the past 10 years has lasted as long as it took to meet Ashwin and Jadeja. In 2013, Jadeja took 26 wickets, Ashwin 27. In 2017, Jadeja 25, Ashwin 21. In the first match this time, Jadeja finished with seven and Ashwin eight. In their Test careers they have dismissed 167 Australians, a partnership astounding in consistency and volume.
The method is simple in the way the very best things can be. Accuracy that rarely errs, deliveries that sometimes turn and sometimes don’t. A fuller length than spinners would bowl elsewhere, inviting the drive while denying the cut or pull. That means no easy runs to release pressure and jeopardy where the scoring opportunities come.
Take Usman Khawaja to start the second innings. He scorched the purest of cover drives through three fielders from Ashwin in the second over, a ball pitched full into the footmarks outside off stump. Two balls later came a similar delivery, more than full enough to drive on other pitches, but not quite as full. In the short distance before it met bat, sharp turn from the rough took it away from the middle of the bat and take the edge to slip.
Next came a parade of five lbws: Labuschagne, Matthew Renshaw, and Peter Handscomb done for turn that straightened down the line, David Warner by the straight ball past the inside edge, Carey missing a reverse sweep. In each case it was that length, full enough to be hitting the stumps no matter the angles that would have taken a regular length past one side or the other.
By then it was 64 for six, Ashwin had five wickets, Jadeja the other, and the game was effectively over. Smith remained, the only player who looked equal to the conditions, using his feet to reach the pitch of the ball, defending with confidence, playing the straight line while allowing turn to beat his edge, counterattacking where possible, including a sweet straight six off Jadeja that helped push back the field.
After all that planning, there was something very retro about Smith hold up his end while the other subsided. Like all of those collapses early in his captaincy, on wickets that spun and wickets that seamed. His current iteration is excellent but not quite the otherworldly batting presence he was. If Smith’s absolute peak in 2017 couldn’t get Australia to better than an honourable loss, their chances this time are very slender indeed.
