Australian stand-in skipper Steve Smith with India head coach Rahul Dravid and R Ashwin during a practice session ahead of the 3rd Test, in Indore on Monday | PTI
INDORE: Mark William Calaway, widely known as ‘The Undertaker’, had one of the most remarkable streaks of all time. At WrestleMania, a big PPV for the WWE, he went 21-0 from 1991 before finally losing a match to Brock Lesnar in 2014.
Every year, every match, Calaway would come back, using all of his old tricks to keep the run going. Even if the script got boring because you knew how it was going to end, he kept the audience hooked. A month before he won the last of his 21 games, a sporting heavyweight took baby steps towards achieving a similar sort of invincibility.
The Australians were in India for the four-match Border-Gavaskar Trophy. The dominance was near total. Four-nil; one win by an innings, another inside three days, one with eight wickets to spare and a fourth with six wickets to spare.
The Indian Test team in India is bit like Calaway at Wrestlemania. They don’t lose all that often. Since their last series loss — England in the winter of 2012 — they have won 15 series in a row, winning 36 of the 44 Tests on offer (six draws and two losses). Out of those 36, 15, including the first Test at Nagpur, have come by an innings. Twenty five per cent of those 36 are by a margin in excess of 150 runs. Only one time has the margin of runs been fewer than 100 (Bengaluru 2017 against Australia).
Just how are they so ludicrously good? If one were to use a Harry Potter reference, think of them as possessing the Elder Wand, Resurrection Stone and the Cloak of Invisibility at the same time. Given they are blessed with so many good options, they keep finding different ways to win.
Top-order batters losing wickets? Lower-order runs. Spinners not taking enough wickets? Bowling dry. Threatening opposition spinners? Counter-attacking runs. Losing the toss? Continuing to take wickets against the run of play to bleed teams of 40-50 runs. Conceding the first innings lead?
LOL, easy there. They don’t concede first innings leads in these parts. Okay, that’s not really true. In the 44 Tests they have played in India since 2013, they have given away the lead on six occasions, with the most recent one coming in New Delhi the week before last. Coming into the series, Australia were one of only two sides who had managed to take first innings leads in multiple Tests.
It’s why this series was a big enough challenge for India. What followed, though, was very predictable. You give them a millimetre to work with and they are good enough to blow it wide open. So, it was not a surprise to see Australia fold in the manner they did because they gave India the turning circumference of a fire engine to work with.
On multiple instances during this series, the commentators have mentioned about how ‘things happen quickly in India’. What that essentially translates to is this: every time you see your TV screen, the number on the wickets column changes. It’s the unrelenting accuracy of the spinners and pacers, the noise of the crowd, nature of the pitch and visiting batters not really trusting their tools.
In the last two years alone, India have bowled out teams inside 36 overs six times (35.5 overs, 28.1 overs, 30.1 overs, 30.3 overs, 31.1 overs and 32.3 overs). Sure, you can blame the pitch but the excuses run out fairly quickly when the Indian lower-order stick around for more overs than the entire opposition line-up.
You can even make a case for saying India’s weakest link -- their sometimes brittle top-order, especially against spin -- would be welcome with open arms by opposition teams. All of this informs why they have built an imposing record.
In essence, touring India can be directly compared to the travails of playing red-ball cricket as a visiting cricketer in Australia in the 90s. A big lead, menacing bowlers with different varieties of zinc oxide on their face, an unapologetic crowd and some of the most talented cricketers to play the game. Remove the zinc cream and the similarities are seemingly endless, even down to how their pacers took wickets while the opposition seamers were an afterthought.
It’s not that the Australians didn’t know any of this. In a short cricket.com.au video posted on February 6, a whole host of Australian players had their say on the challenge of facing India in India. “I think it’s always been a bit of a crown jewel for Australian touring teams,” southpaw Mitchell Starc had said in the video. “It’s one of, if not the hardest place to play away with such foreign conditions (and) how strong the Indian team is at the moment as well.”
Steven Smith, one of only four visiting captains to have tasted a win in Indian conditions since 2010 (Alastair Cook, Joe Root and Graeme Smith are the others), was even more intimate. “It’s a difficult place to win a Test, let alone a series,” Smith had said. “I think if you can win in India, that would be bigger than an Ashes series.”
As the caravan moves from New Delhi to Indore, the visitors, further depleted by the absence of regular skipper Pat Cummins but bolstered by the likely inclusions of Starc and Cameron Green, will work towards reducing the wrongs of the previous two Tests. The hosts, though, are in a position of strength. At this point in time, they only need to turn up and they are already in a position of ascendancy.
Like Calaway used to do at WrestleMania.
