Well begun isn’t half done

At the end of the 13th over,the players went back indoors to see out a brief drizzle. First ball post their return,Umesh banged it in again. This time,it was angled further in,and climbed on the batsman with a little more pace. Warner,late on his pull,gloved it loopily to MS Dhoni behind the stumps.

First ball of Umesh’s next over,he went over the wicket to Shaun Marsh,and angled a full delivery across the leftie,the third in Australia’s top three. Till then,Umesh had consistently shaped the ball into the left handers,and Marsh probably expected this one to do so as well,when he aimed a drive towards cover. The ball stayed its course,however,and Marsh found himself reaching away from his body to see the ball slicing off his bat face into the hands of Virat Kohli at backward point.

Loud reception

Enter Ricky Ponting,to a reception that suggested that the 70,000 present at the MCG believed he was walking out into that ground for the final or penultimate time. The second ball he faced was short and climbing rapidly. Ponting at his peak might have pulled it in front of square. The pull was the shot late-2011 Ponting attempted,only to feel the ball ricochet off his right bicep into the space between his neck and his helmet grill. At the end of that over,Umesh angled one into the blockhole. Ponting seemed to see it late,and fell over as he dug it out.

Somehow,he survived till the rain fell again to force an early lunch,overbalancing on more than one occasion,notably during the execution of a pull off Zaheer Khan that streaked to the boundary behind square leg.

Maybe that sight prompted Zaheer and Umesh to keep pitching short after play resumed,with a deep backward square leg giving fine leg company on the leg side boundary. The tactic didn’t work at all. Both bowlers struggled to get the ball to rise above chest height and both drifted down the leg side regularly. Cowan and Ponting took full toll – the former sporadically between stretches of arm-shouldering and blocking,the latter more often if not with full control at all times.

It wasn’t until the appearance of Ravichandran Ashwin from the Southern Stand end,and that of Ishant Sharma three overs later from the Members’ end,that India regained some degree of control. Both Ponting and Cowan reached their fifties when these two bowled in tandem,but their scoring rate dropped to manageable proportions.

Unlucky Ishant

Ishant has an unfortunate habit of bowling nasty,testing spells without reward. He sent down one such spell here. In six overs,he did everything bar take a wicket. He had a huge appeal turned down when Ponting was struck on the pads by an off cutter while offering no stroke,struck Ponting on the gloves to see the ball drop agonisingly short of point,saw one balloon off Cowan’s leading edge just wide of his follow through and beat Cowan with one angled in from around the wicket before taking off like an off-break.

The crowd grew steadily noisier as this spell progressed,and was positively buzzing when Umesh returned to replace Ishant. Three balls into his new spell,he bowled his best delivery of the day,shaping away late from just back of a length and climbing to kiss the shoulder of Ponting’s bat through to VVS Laxman at second slip.

Ashwin impact

Post-tea,Ashwin bowled unchanged till the arrival of the second new ball. Twenty four of the off spinner’s 26 overs came in one stretch. In all,his figures read 26-2-71-1,the number in the last column denoting the wicket of Ed Cowan,caught behind by Dhoni cutting a ball that bounced and went straight on from around the wicket. Replays suggested that Cowan hadn’t edged the ball,but Ashwin wouldn’t have complained. It had seemed that he was gunning for this sort of dismissal,constantly testing a shortish length and a narrow line outside off stump against Cowan’s cut,with a sweeper on the fence. It was a strange sort of plan on a wicket with little turn and slowish bounce,but it worked somehow.

Ashwin’s length wasn’t always on target,but he bowled untiringly and asked enough questions to keep the batsmen wary on a first-day track. This meant that Dhoni could rotate his seamers from the other end without recourse to part-timers at any point in the day. Zaheer Khan could pick his moments to up his intensity,Umesh could be allowed a little bit of over-exuberance and Ishant could afford to bowl superbly without luck.