We all love Uzzie, but we’d love some runs from him even more

We’ve been so busy talking about Marnus Labuschagne and Steve Smith and Nathan McSweeney that we’ve hardly gotten around to talking about Usman Khawaja and his ever-diminishing returns.

Centuries aren’t everything, but they are milestones in a Test batsman’s career, and it’s some time since Khawaja passed one. His last hundred was in the first Test of the Ashes last year – three partners ago.

Usman Khawaja goes cheaply again.Credit: Getty Images

The least of Khawaja’s virtues hitherto was an important one for an opener: he stayed in. Now even that faculty is deserting him. He’s 38 and his average is 44 and the margin between those figures keeps narrowing. Don Bradman broke his age several times, but that was at golf.

Khawaja has become an endearing figure in Australian cricket, but public favour is not inexhaustible and nor should it be. It buys time, but ultimately cannot be substituted for performance.

His struggles exemplify what has become of this series and perversely enough why it is so engrossing. The players most under the hammer on both sides are the oldest and best loved, and no one seems to know quite what to do about them.

When it comes to change, cricket is the most sentimental game of all. To corrupt LP Hartley, the past is a familiar country; they do things just the way we like it there.

Jasprit Bumrah in full flight.Credit: Getty Images

It means that Australia almost certainly will take a line through Smith, reassure themselves that class will win out and make only compulsory changes for the last two Tests.

Even if the selectors were of a mind to overhaul, what form can they draw on? We’re again in the black hole authorities have knowingly created, with the Sheffield Shield in a two-month recess while we all half-watch the BBL out of the corner of our eyes. Max Bryant is fun to watch at Christmas time, but so is Love Actually. I’d give Sam Konstas a crack, but the Australian system is over-protective of youth as it never was once. Maybe it’s an OHS thing?

It means that as the caravan moves on to a climactic Boxing Day-New Year’s Melbourne-Sydney jamboree, neither team is quite sure where it stands.

India were a shocked team when it arrived here, having just been swept by New Zealand at home. Australia was shocked by India in the first Test, gathered themselves up to dominate the second and third rubbers, but were thwarted in Brisbane by weather and their own impatience.

So it’s 1-1 with everything to play for, including a place in the world Test championship final. If Australia do not win this series outright, they will find themselves at the mercy of Sri Lanka and conditions in two Test matches in Galle in February.

In the normal course of events, India would now fall away here. But that has been Australia’s problem latterly, home and away. So who will blink first? See intrigue, above.

One verity has been reaffirmed – that a series between brittle and imperfect teams can be equally if not more engaging than a meeting of virtuosos. Twenty years ago, in Steve Waugh’s last series, Australia and India played a high-scoring 1-1 draw in a four-Test rubber here, replete with six scores of 400 or more and four individual double centuries. It was quite a show, but this is losing nothing by comparison.

Travis Head thrashes another boundary.Credit: AP

Don’t be misled too far by momentum. Yes, Australia lost some skin at the end of the Gabba Test and India took a bit of heart, to the extent that you could say that India is taking all the momentum of a 185-run first innings deficit into Melbourne.

But the last day of the game can be dismissed on the grounds that Australia were in a position from which they could not lose and tried improbably to win. The execution was messy, but the idea was commendably bold.

Besides, under modern management, cricketers are adept – more so than fans – at letting the past go and beginning the “process” for the next engagement. Most of Australia’s most humbling defeats this century – 47 all out in Cape Town in 2011, the Stokes miracle at Headingley in 2019, to name but two – have been followed immediately by wins.

Also more than any other sport, cricket is a game of alternating roosters and feather dusters – sometimes daily – and the best learn to incorporate this into their mindsets. India, remember, started this series with a textbook demonstration of the art of regrouping.

Individual momentum does matter. It’s called form. It’s working like a dream for Travis Head, and like a nightmare against Khawaja. It’s working like a law of nature for Jasprit Bumrah. Until and unless Australia can find a way to combat his deadliness with new ball and old, nothing about the outcome of this series can be presumed.

Since the summer was reconfigured to play all the Test cricket at the start, the Melbourne-Sydney double has rarely been live. This time it is, and hallelujah to that. All that is needed is for another law of nature to be defied and for the rain to stay away from Sydney.

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