‘How you holding up after that?’: Cummins and co hold their nerve to win Test classic at the MCG
“How you holding up after that?” Pat Cummins tells me before landing a big high-five. It’s less than 20 minutes after Australia have pulled off an incredible Test victory. Pat Cummins is beaming. Pat Cummins is buoyant. He can’t stop smiling. He’s still trying to catch his breath.
And he doesn’t sound like a captain who’s led his country to one of the most famous Test wins in history in a historic setting at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. He instead sounds like a fan. A fan of Test cricket. A fan who cannot believe what he’s witnessed. A fan who cannot believe he got to be a part of it.
Cummins isn’t the only Australian cricketer who’s beaming, buoyant or unable to stop smiling, while catching his breath.
A few minutes before I get Cummins for the post-match interview, I bump into Marnus Labuschagne, who’s more or less lost his voice. A day earlier Marnus, a fellow WWE fan, had told me about how the first four days of this crazy Test match had felt like the Attitude Era of wrestling. He’d even drawn comparisons with specific matches involving certain high-profile wrestlers. This evening as we hugged, I ask him if the finish of this Test felt like being in the main event of WrestleMania.
“Even bigger, brother, even bigger,” he says in his hoarse voice.
Not only does he sound like a fan who cannot believe he got to be a part of it, he’d carried on like he was a fan who couldn’t believe he got to be a part of it as well.
On the field, in the slip cordon, and around the batters with a helmet on. Probably the only Aussie who was more excited to be in the middle of the MCG on Monday apart from Labuschagne, was 19-year-old Sam Konstas. And he got to keep a stump as a memoir, courtesy Travis Head who made it a point to walk back to the pitch as the players walked off after the match was done, to pick it up for the teenaged debutant.
I shared a quick moment with Head as well by the way before the chat with Cummins. Unlike his captain and the No.3, he didn’t have too many words to express his unbridled joy at having been a part of the historic affair at the ‘G.
He too sounded like a fan who’d had the best day of his life as he simply went, “Can you believe that?”
It was a fair question too. For, till maybe 20 or so minutes into the third session, few would have believed that Australia would go on to forge a victory, and too in the comprehensive fashion they did eventually. India had seemed to have hit cruise control with Yashasvi Jaiswal and Rishabh Pant in the middle. The two left-handers had batted out the middle session, looking in complete control of the situation, which for the visitors clearly meant batting out the day and going to Sydney with the Border-Gavaskar Trophy series tied up at 1-1.
That is until Pant decided to chance his arm, against the run of play, and tried to hit him into the crowd over long-on. Only to be snaffled by Mitch Marsh.
To think that Head was only bowling because Australia mainly wanted to get their overrate in order. Another wrinkle to an overall unbelievable finish.
What followed was one of the most dramatic passages of play the MCG, and the 74,000 around the iconic venue, have ever been privy to. A collapse of epic proportions, 7-34 in all, as India found a way to lose a Test that they seemed to have no business losing.
And the knockout blow would come from Cummins. It’s always Cummins. It probably always will be Cummins. After having drawn early blood with Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul in the same over with the new-ball, it was Cummins who’d get rid of the biggest obstacle in young Jaiswal. When it mattered most.
We’ve spent nearly the entire summer singing praises and writing epics on Jasprit Bumrah, and deservedly so. But it’s time we did the same for the Australian captain. How blessed are we to see two of the best ever in prime form in the same series, on the same stage. And as the momentum oscillated between both teams, as it did from the start of Boxing Day in Melbourne, so did the noise around the MCG. The Indian roar blending in with the Aussie cheer.
It was pure theatre. It had been pure theatre for mostly all of five days at the MCG. And looking back, we shouldn’t have been surprised that there would be a final twist to one of the most topsy turvy Tests in recent memory.
The Border-Gavaskar Trophy had already lived up to its billing in the first three matches. But it needed the kind of close finish that only five-day Test cricket can provide.
For, let’s face it. When Test cricket does it right, there’s nothing quite else like it. This was Test cricket at its ultimate best, with a swerve and a surprise at every corner. On every day, in every session, in nearly every quarter.
And it also helped that a record number of people came to witness it over five unforgettable days at the grandest stage of them all.
And it was only fitting that those indulging in it around the MCG enjoyed it as much as those involved in it in the middle.
To quote Cummins, “How you holding up after that?”
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