Cheteshwar Pujara and Jasprit Bumrah key if India are to rescue tour of Australia
If England’s experiences in Australia are anything to go by, India’s chances of coming back from 1-0 down to win their four-Test series are slimmer than chapatis.
Only once in the past hundred years have England lost the opening Test in Australia and recovered to win the series: in 1954-5, when they came back from losing the Brisbane Test by an innings, a defeat almost as devastating as India’s dismissal for 36 in the day/night Test in Adelaide.
But India now have one factor working in their favour, which England never had. Operating in their own bio-bubble, India’s cricketers will be almost immune from the public abuse which is showered upon England’s players the moment they start losing.
Front pages of newspapers, taxi drivers, hotel porters, waiters, golf-course caddies: everyone that England meet on tour in Australia will reassure them that the Poms have no chance and are the worst team they have ever sent Down Under. On the rare tours England happen to win, Australians switch off and ignore the cricket.
Even so, immunised as they are from Australian derision, India are on course for the sort of wipe-out that England suffered in 2013-4, unless a miracle-worker stands up at the Melbourne Cricket Ground when the second Test starts on Boxing Day. It will also be the 100th Test between Australia and India.
Australia’s current pace attack does not generate quite the same fear that Mitchell Johnson did at his peak, when any ball was likely to take a batsman’s head off. As a combination though, Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood are the equal of Johnson, Ryan Harris and Peter Siddle, with both attacks backed up by Nathan Lyon.
India also have a similar handicap to England after they lost their opening Test in 2013-4. One of England’s leading batsmen, Jonathan Trott, had to go home. So has India’s captain Virat Kohli, to attend the birth of his first child, after top-scoring for India with 74 in the first innings of the Adelaide Test before India made their lowest Test score in the second.
To offset India’s loss of Kohli, in some part, David Warner has been ruled out of the second Test with the groin injury he suffered in the white-ball series. But Warner would not have been allowed into Australia’s bio-bubble in Melbourne in any event, having done some recent rehabilitation in Sydney.
In 1954-5 England had a X-factor fast bowler to turn the series round in Frank Tyson. India have one already in Jasprit Bumrah, who took 21 wickets at only 17 runs each in India’s last Test series in Australia. India have the attack to bowl Australia out, but they have to put runs on the board.
India fortunately have the perfect role-model of a miracle-worker, the man to turn this series around, in Cheteshwar Pujara. When India won 2-1 last time in Australia, when Steve Smith and David Warner were banned, the hosts still had their first-choice attack of Starc, Cummins, Hazlewood and Lyon, and Pujara blunted them all.
Pujara was the alpha blocker, soaking up the overs, forcing Australia’s fast bowlers into fourth and fifth spells, scoring three centuries in the four Tests, batting for more than eight hours in Melbourne and Sydney. He “batted time” as so few batsmen can now do.
Pujara did not play in the last IPL, he has never played a T20 international, not least because his knees prevent him from diving around. Instead, Pujara focuses his green eyes on the red ball. He just leaves everything he can outside off stump for hours, then picks bowlers off when they tire, in masterful exhibitions of how to pace a Test innings.
If Pujara can do it again over the next month, it will set the ideal example for an England batsman to follow this time next year; and Mayank Agarwal is a fine opening batsman, more of a stroke-player than Pujara, who helped Pujara last time to turn the tide.
Can Joe Root and Zak Crawley do something similar for England this time next year? Better of course not to go 1-0 down in the opening Test if history is much to go by, but at some stage an England batsman has to stand up and play an immortal innings if they are to regain the Ashes.
