Why a five-match series is the perfect Test for Australia and India

The best thing about Australia’s fightback win over India in Adelaide is that it was in just the second Test of five. There is still so much cricket to come, so many ways this could play out. Credit where credit is rarely given to those who pushed for five Tests between these teams. It’s a latter-day rarity, but it’s put the serious back into series.

One Test is by definition not a series. Two usually feels unfinished, 1-1, or a win and a draw, crying out for another match. Three is a minimum. But even three can leave fans feeling short-changed.

India’s Shubman Gill is bowled by Mitchell Starc in Adelaide.Credit: AP

If this was a three-Test series, Steve Smith and Virat Kohli, for instance, would have only two more innings each. They’re both giants of these times, but at uncertain stages in their histories. Two more innings would prove little. Yes, Kohli made a hundred in Perth, but it was nearly the softest of his 30.

Ditto Marnus Labuschagne: he’s made some runs, but needs more, which means more innings. There must be an allowance for accidents, like leg-side strangles, for instance.

At the other end of the scale, Yashasvi Jaiswal and Nittish Kumar Reddy have made eye-catching first impressions, but even with one more match they would constitute only glimpses. Don’t be misled by the Jaiswal’s ducks; they’re an opener’s occupational hazard. There may come a time when we’ve seen too much of him, but it’s not yet.

A four-Test series presents the same problem as two. It’s an even number, so is liable to end up unresolved.

Five Tests, though, represent a gamut. A five-Test series in Australia means players have to negotiate a range of climates, circumstances and conditions, including a pink-ball game. A five-game series has – mostly – its own internal narrative of waxing and waning, thrust and parry, turns to follow twists.

It poses questions and gives rise to intrigues. What will become of the Travis Head-Mohammed Siraj tete-a-tete? They’ve patched it up for now, but there will be many more confrontations. Can Jasprit Bumrah keep it up for five Tests, and if not, what do India have in reserve?

Will Nathan McSweeney survive the series, and if not, who comes next? It was fair enough to give him two Tests, but to date he’s done only enough to earn another. Will the ageing Australians hang together bodily? You might be able to bluff your way through two or three Tests, but not five.

In a short series, there’s no tomorrow, and often that governs the tempo. The compression sometimes makes for good entertainment, of course. But in a five-Test series, there nearly always is a tomorrow, and that makes for a whole new set of delectable unknowns. And it creates leeway for interference from weather.

Now that the Australia-India scoreline is 1-1, the Boxing Day Test will be live, and with luck the New Year’s Test in Sydney, too. They’re oddities in that they are cornerstone fixtures that usually come at the end. Too often in recent decades, they’ve been turned into postscripts. They hold up as occasions, but without the frisson when a trophy is on the line.

In this five-Test series, whoever wins the third in Brisbane will have the lead, but not the chocolates. It won’t necessarily even have momentum, a much overrated factor in modern cricket. Professional cricket teams are much better than their forebears at putting the past behind them.

Some of that is down to the rattling pace of the game now, leaving no time for brooding or dwelling. Setting aside five days for a Test match now is not a schedule, but an ambit claim.

This informs the bigger picture of which this series forms a part. For decades, Test teams struggled to win away from home. And in its first two editions, the World Test Championship became pretty much a two-horse race.

Mohammed Siraj and Travis Head exchange pleasantries in Adelaide.Credit: AP

Suddenly, both verities have been upturned. In the last couple of months, New Zealand have swept a series in India and England, India and Bangladesh have won Tests away from home. As the troupe that is modern cricket moves around the world, familiarity has bred … familiarisation.

One outcome is that the Test championship table is breathlessly tight. India’s win in Perth propelled it to the top, but Australia with its reversal in Adelaide have assumed first place and nudged India down to third. Two days later, South Africa usurped Australia on top. England and Sri Lanka remain in the running. The final between the two top teams will be at Lord’s in June next year.

The system is byzantine, but what it amounts to for Australia is that without a comprehensive win in this series, it will depend on beating a regathering Sri Lanka in two Tests in Galle next February. Sri Lanka will be dusting off their plans now. For Australia, that will make for a seat-of-the-pants ride.

Philosophically, though, the moral is clear. Be it a match, a series or a championship, the drama is all the richer when it has time to grow.

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