There are times, on a placid batting pitch, when a good performance can’t win you a match but the lack of one can lose you a match. There are times when a good innings is an achievement that belongs on the standard tier, but continuing it elevates it to the realm of the special.
When Australia lost two wickets relatively quickly in the final session of day one in Ahmedabad, having chosen to bat in the fourth and final Border-Gavaskar Test, a position of 170 for four could easily have become an insufficient total on a surface where the threat level was beige. By the time the next wicket fell about 22 hours later, Usman Khawaja and Cameron Green had made that score 378 for five, wearing down India’s bowlers for the lower order. When the Australian innings was said and done, the team had made 480 and taken two days out of the game.
Someone had needed to do the job for Australia, and two someones had. Khawaja’s effort grew more astonishing with each passing hour. By the time his vigil had ended – five sessions and change to collect 180 runs in heat that was stifling and relentless – it was no surprise that it was his longest innings by any measure.
More than that, it climbed the charts. Of all those on record, only 10 Test innings in India had ever exceeded his 422 balls faced. Only nine had bettered his 608 minutes. Those metrics are incomplete due to partial scorecards, but the records still cover well north of 6,000 attempts. Khawaja batted more than 10 hours, not just scoring runs but hoping to push India’s batting deeper into the game where the pitch might begin to deteriorate.
There was something very reminiscent of his Dubai effort from 2018, where the temperature was dry and over 40 degrees compared to the humid mid-30s that seemed almost as taxing here. There he batted close to nine hours, saying later that he may have had heatstroke. Extreme conditions seem to draw from Khawaja some kind of meditative concentration. The rhythm was never disrupted, the tempo of the innings never shifted. Shuffle forward to block on the front foot, draw that leg away to make space to defend off the back foot. Tap the ball on leg stump for a single, tap the one outside off stump to cover. Scrape, scrape, clonk.
Green, meanwhile, changed his tempo all the time. He scored quietly at first after being 49 not out overnight, raising his half-century early on the way to adding 16 runs in the first hour. His propensity for the defensive patient innings has been evident since the beginning of his Test career, when most of his batting was hesitant. The attacking side of his game has gradually been let out, as it was in bursts here.
Three boundaries in an over from Umesh Yadav, all lashed through the off side, were enough to have the fast bowler dragged from the attack. One fierce pull shot from Mohammad Shami was enough to have the square leg umpire decide to adjudicate the match from point instead. A sudden rush that took his score to 94 with four balls to go before lunch was not enough to lure him into chasing the milestone, instead sensibly taking a single and heading to the break.
Safely raising his century afterwards, Green said later that aside from the elation and emotion of the moment, it was more pragmatically an achievement to tick off that made him feel like he belonged as a Test cricketer. The match situation completed the picture. “That’s what makes it really special. You want to score runs at a time when the team needs it,” he said on ABC radio.
“It could have gone anywhere. I think my second ball I left and it nearly hit off stump. So it’s little things like that could completely change a game. I’m incredibly thankful that I could bat with Uzzie for the whole time. He’s an experienced head, and such a special player. It was good fun being out there with him.”
Green eventually fell for 114 deep into the second session, gloving down the leg side against the tireless off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin. Khawaja couldn’t switch back on after tea, finally missing one of his many flicks to square leg, hit in front. By then enough of a job had been done to allow Nathan Lyon and Todd Murphy to form a partnership of 70. Ashwin finished with six wickets, his colleagues went for plenty. It may not be enough to win Australia the match, but that first-day danger is no more.
