And their captain was said to have not displayed the kind of gung-ho body language expected of someone leading a strong Australian team, while not looking at his sharpest either. Not to forget having been tactically found out by the opposition.
Now, all those problems seem to have flowed into the Indian dressing-room. They are the team in trouble. Their batters aren’t firing. Their fast bowlers look cooked. Their team selection is under intense scrutiny. And it’s their captain who’s being pulled up for not showing up for the challenge, with two very soft dismissals here in Adelaide, while also being criticised for a lack of tactical awareness.
Welcome to the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, the ultimate rollercoaster ride. Since 2017 after all, every series between the two teams has seen teams trading wins and the series being open till the final Test. Except when Australia visited India last year, every series between the two has stood at 1-1 after the first two Tests. You could argue that if Australia hadn’t blown a glorious opportunity to level the series in Delhi back in February 2023, the story would have been the same then too. It’s easy to imagine the scrutiny now well and truly being on the visitors as we travel to Brisbane for the third Test.
Pat Cummins has rarely looked more pumped and intense with his wicket celebrations than he has over the three days at the Adelaide Oval this weekend. It was evident in India’s first innings, especially after he bounced out Rishabh Pant, and even more so with how animated he was after getting KL Rahul out on Saturday night, once more with the short ball.
While Mitchell Starc got all the plaudits on Day-Night 1 for his exploits with the pink ball, bowling full and knocking stumps out, five out of Cummins’ seven wickets in this Test came off a short ball.
He was faster. He was meaner. He was sharper. And he was more fired-up than you usually see him, as he ripped through India’s lower order on Sunday afternoon. It showed on the speed gun too, with his speeds consistently hitting the mid 140s. Of course he’d not allow you to read too much into that extra venom in his bowling, basing it more diplomatically on this being a big series. But after having copped a lot of flak from various quarters in the country, this was Cummins making a statement, probably even without realising it.
Going into the third day, it was always going to Rishabh Pant or bust. But hopes of a Pant special finished in anticlimactic fashion, as the aggressive left-hander was nicked off by Starc off the last ball of the first over, ironically playing a defensive prod to a length delivery outside off-stump.
From that point on, it was all Cummins, as he finished with his first five-wicket haul, 5/57, at the Adelaide Oval. And whether it was the angle of his attack or the fields he set for the Indian lower-order, the Australian captain’s intentions seemed pretty clear. To not just knock them out but to bulldoze them, and give India a hiding, but also do so in morale-crushing fashion.
He started with targeting R Ashwin’s body and getting him caught down the leg-side, and then surrounded the likes of Harshit Rana and Jasprit Bumrah with an attacking short-ball field. He hit both the tailenders flush on the helmet, before bouncing out the Indian fast bowler playing his second Test.
He did the same to the impressive Nitish Reddy, even if his young IPL teammate had put on an impressive show again with the bat. Sticking with the flavour of his celebrations, Cummins punched the air and ran towards his slip cordon, realising that he’d eliminated the final obstacle on Australia’s path to a very comprehensive eighth straight pink-ball Test win in Adelaide.
He’d already delivered a telling moment late on the second evening, like he does so often, by bowling a dreamy delivery to peg Rohit’s off-stump back, further exacerbating the Indian captain’s woes with the bat in Test cricket this year. Having already sacrificed his opening slot for the sake of the team, where does Rohit go if in case he does fail to put runs on the board at the Gabba.
While the big break between the first and second Tests was looked at as being a deterrent for Australia, considering all the reported insecurities around their set-up, the short turnaround is an issue for India. On two fronts. Firstly, there’s a risk of their over-reliance on Jasprit Bumrah coming to haunt them at some stage. Although it was dismissed as cramp, the fact is that he did look in discomfort as he began his final spell of the evening on the second evening. Bumrah looked fine while bowling two more overs soon after, but like Rohit would say later in the day, the rest of India’s bowling attack will have to join the party if the defending Border-Gavaskar champions have to regain their lead in the series.
As for Australia, their fast bowlers needed only 80 overs between themselves to take 20 wickets across the two innings in Adelaide, and will be the fresher of the two attacks, and potentially more potent.
How the script has flipped in the space of only two weeks.
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How the script has flipped. Only two weeks ago, all the issues you could think of were in the Australian camp. They were the Test team in turmoil. Their batters weren’t firing. Their fast bowlers looked undercooked. Their team selection was under a cloud. There was a scary lack of depth, with apparently nobody outside the immediate set-up to pick from.