36 and out: Virat Kohli departs after Adelaide Oval horror show

Thirty-six. Or, if you prefer, 36. If you’re Virat Kohli, you’d prefer neither. If you’re the eye of cricket history, you would have to blink.

Australia was once bowled out for 36, but that was on a wet wicket in 1902. Modern cricket teams, pampered, primped and prepared at enormous expense, have no business being dismissed for what a club cricket team would be ashamed to rack up. But there you have it: never before has a Test team been dismissed with neither batsmen nor extras using only a single column in the scorecard.

So the world’s foremost cricket personality will depart Australia next week a loser – a gracious loser, but a heavy one. And he will leave his team trailing 0-1 in the series for the Border-Gavaskar Trophy after a match dominated by the bowlers and shaped by the pitch. From the point Kohli fell, in fact, the result was more or less foreordained.

As Kohli faced Patrick Cummins this afternoon, India was 72 ahead, cornered but still competing. Kohli’s first innings had been the match’s most distinguished; again he looked earnest and unflustered; he had guided a soothing boundary to third man; hope still sprang eternal.

But the Australians have long fancied Kohli on a sixth stump line, jabbing square. And again such a delivery drew India’s captain in, Cameron Green taking a fumbling catch from a flying edge at gully, Cummins clocking up a 150th Test wicket.

Kohli loitered while the replay was checked, as if reluctant to take his leave; he turned when it was confirmed, taking his team’s chances with him. Within seven overs, India had been bundled out for their lowest total in Test cricket; twenty-one overs later, Australia had concluded an eight-wicket victory. Kohli said afterwards he was “struggling for words” to describe the experience; those whose job it was find them felt somewhat similarly.

This was the slowest scoring Test in Australia this millennium, batsmen ekeing out barely 2.5 runs an over, but also among the fastest moving, ending in barely half the allotted time.

The bowling was fast though not furious; on the contrary, it today attained a precision that could only be called clinical. A television graphic of where the ball passed through the batting crease during India’s second innings revealed a tight crescent, like the bullet holes a firing squad might leave.

These days in Test cricket everything is measured, producing columns of figures, clouds of data. It could be condensed here to 0.68 degrees, the average seam deviation in India’s second innings. It does not sound much, representing about a quarter of a bat’s width, but at the sort of speeds Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood achieve it is enough to shoot rays through a batting line-up.

Pat Cummins hands the ball to Josh Hazlewood after they bowled India out for 36. Picture: Getty Images

It rather vindicated Tim Paine’s intuition of granting Cummins the new pink ball in the second innings, seam rather than swing having menaced the batsmen’s edges and stumps throughout the match. It brought Prithvi Shaw’s wicket in the dark on Friday night; but we hadn’t seen anything yet.

In theory, day three should be offer the best batting conditions of a Test, the pitch’s early life having drained away, deterioration yet to have set in. It usually features bowlers applying themselves, patiently and frugally, to prising their opponents out.

Adelaide, moreover, has a reputation for sun-soaked, run-soaked Test matches. When these countries met here in 2003, Ricky Ponting and Rahul Dravid traded double hundreds and 36 wickets fell for 1506 runs; in 2014, there were six individual centuries amid 32 wickets for 1566 runs.

From the outset, however, this Adelaide Oval pitch has belied all our understanding of drop-in pitches, offering encouragement sideways and upwards, to which batsmen out of practice against red balls let alone pink were unequal. What unfolded was a demolition, although less like the action of a wrecking ball on a building than the implosion of a smokestack – sudden, total, self-feeding, pace-gathering.

Cummins knocked out the keystone in the day’s fifth over, angling a delivery in that Cheteshwar Pujara was good enough to nick as it nipped away. India’s hard-won first-innings advantage no longer looked quite so commanding.

Hazlewood from the River End then hit a line that demanded a stroke and a length that made this perilous, nicking off Mayank Agarwal and Ajinkya Rahane in a double wicket maiden. The big screen’s tracing of it had an onomatopoeic character: WOOOWO.

India’s tail again sold itself cheaply, Ashwin providing Hazlewood with his 200th Test wicket, Hanuma Vihari with his eighth five-for. The thwack of the ball into Paine’s gloves was audible, the collective wince when Cummins struck Mohammad Shami’s arm palpable. The last did not take the field when India came out to defend 90, of which Australia made short work.

Joe Burns, last man picked for this Test after a ruinous run of outs, took fifteen balls and 27 minutes to edge a boundary to third man; Umesh Yadav and Jasprit Bumrah then offered a generous long hops, each pulled eagerly for four.

Later, like a captive slipping his bonds, he used his feet to drive Ashwin in the V along the ground and in the air. As if in celebration, he finished the match with a top edged hook that bounced out of long leg’s hands for six, bringing up his first Test half century in more than a year. For him a new beginning, for India’s captain an uncomfortable pause. With fond memories of Test feats there, Brian Lara called his first-born child Sydney; whatever can be predicted of the imminent Kohli offspring, it will not be named Adelaide.