First Test, Australia v India: Fearless kings fall on open, reckless blades

When you’re No 1, at anything, there will exist a temptation to behave accordingly.

Asking Cheteshwar Pujara to score faster is like expecting a watch to tick faster. Picture: AAP

When you’re No 1, at anything, there will exist a temptation to behave accordingly. After all, leaders proverbially have a presence, project an aura.

Plus, let’s be frank, it’s fun. In Australia’s long cricket primacy, they exuded a mentally disintegrating air, a self-reinforcing expectation of success.

India have enjoyed cricket’s yellow jersey for four of the 15 years in which rankings have been officially calculated — a good run, all things considered. But they have not toured here with that status before, and yesterday, as their top four sacrificed themselves in 20 overs with swishing, open, diagonal blades, they looked like a team expecting the world to bow down before them. Never mind going hard at the ball. These were hands of stone to rival Roberto Duran’s.

Virat Kohli, his arrival at the crease preluded by a week-long media drum roll, was as culpable as anyone. Answering questions after winning the toss, he slouched behind his shades, hands in pockets, endangering an interlocutor with his charisma.

An hour later, he drove avidly, greedily, was expertly pouched in the gully by a cartwheeling Usman Khawaja and could hardly compute it. He stood surveying his dismissal with a mix of dismay and disapproval, as though entitled to a multi-millionaire’s mulligan.

As ‘‘good, hard cricket’’ has been an Australian trope these last few years, with opinion differing about the proportions of goodness and hardness, so “fearless cricket” has been a leitmotiv for Kohli. “Virat Kohli fearless cricket” returns 226,000 google hits.

But just as there has proven a fine line between hardness and abrasiveness, so can the fearless turn reckless. Chesteshwar Pujara alone displayed the requisite reck, guarding off stump against pace like a sentry, deploying his front pad against Nathan Lyon like a sandbag. Thirty balls did he need to get going after lunch — more deliveries than the opening pair survived between them.

A wallflower at the Indian Premier League since 2014, Pujara has been scolded in India these last few years for slow scoring — a bit like expressing disappointment in a watch for not ticking faster. What he has is the courage to be his own man, which is the very definition of fearlessness.

Did Kohli and his men underestimate the Australians? They certainly underestimated the early seam movement offered to the pace bowlers, the baked-in bounce available to Lyon, the need to be secure as batting conditions reach their best.

Many a fielding team has been broken by a long, hot, fruitless afternoon at Adelaide Oval. The Indians hardly gave themselves a chance of lasting so long.

Instead they scattered five sixes in the first 100 runs. Having just cleared the boundary with the fourth six from Lyon, Rohit Sharma miscued an attempted fifth from the next ball.

Having achieved the fifth with a ragged leading edge, Rishabh Pant went down on his haunches to heave Mitchell Starc in the direction of the Victor Richardson Gates. Youth is his pardon, but it is not an indefinite one.

Only Ravi Ashwin seemed capable of embedding alongside Pujara, although the comfort with which he defended for nearly two hours underlined how his colleagues, repenting at leisure, had squandered the advantage of first innings. With number ten for company, Pujara provided two further sixes, cleaving 30 runs from his last 18 deliveries.

Australia? The Australians hung in, their rope-a-dope bowling in the morning, hitting full lengths with upright seams against batsmen determined to assert themselves, good enough for the scenario.

They maintained their heart and hydration through an enervating afternoon, whites clinging to sweat-soaked sides — Peter Handscomb, wearing his protective gear at slip, and Marcus Harris, donning a helmet at leg gully, even looked a tad overdressed.

The collective effort actually bore strong resemblance to that elusive “good, hard cricket” that Australian players have been on about these last few months — disciplined bowling, alert catching, phlegmatic captaincy and sure-handed keeping, with no need for snarling and scarcely a “line” in sight.

A uniformly excellent day’s outcricket concluded with a quicksilver run out, Pat Cummins finding Pujara short of his ground from side-on despite the strain of nineteen overs. It is early days for their comeback campaign, but they could scarcely have done more.

They have now seen an Indian armour with a good deal of chink. And for all the talk of the visitors “never having a better opportunity” in Australia, they are flattered by their ranking, derived as it is from a phase of home success since eaten away by comprehensive series defeats in South Africa and England.

Most of Test cricket’s No 1s this decade have been much the same, falling upwards into the slot because someone must fill it — Australia’s last spell there was ended by seventh-ranked Sri Lanka. Nobody really has built to last. It seems an idea from a bygone era.

At tea, the big screen showed highlights of the Adelaide Test here 15 years ago, when rankings were a new thing, and there was seldom a reason to refer to them anyway, daylight occupying second place behind Australia.

In that match, Rahul Dravid batted 14 hours, with a yogi’s serenity. The footage was like something recovered from a time capsule along with a copy of the day’s paper, a collected Shakespeare and a New Testament.

India were then building towards an all-weather, all-terrain cricket that would win a World T20, then a World Cup, and lead to two spells atop the world Test rankings. But if they tackle this tour as they tackled yesterday morning, they will not hold onto that ranking long.