India vs Australia 2017: India fail to cross Barrier O’Keefe

For good measure, Kohli turned around at least on three occasions to see whether his stumps actually had been knocked back. Each time he turned, the scene behind him only looked graver.

The target of 441 was not even in question. When India came out to bat it was only a question of how long they could survive. So well have they batted as a unit during the home season that you believed that the first innings submission was a freak misadventure not to be repeated again. But it was only to get worse. The Indian second innings only lasted 33.5 overs even if they bettered their first innings total of 105 by two runs, and it was O’Keefe again who ran through them with a second six-wicket haul to end up with the second-most economical 12-wicket match haul in the last 100 years.

Steve O’Keefe’s second straight six wicket-haul helped Australia win the first Test by a massive 333 runs with two days to spare and end India’s 19-match unbeaten streak. (Source: AP)

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It also brought to an end Australia’s Test-win drought on Indian soil that had lasted 4,502 days—a figure which was revealed by skipper Steve Smith—and handed India their first defeat on home soil in 52 months. No wonder then that Smith & Co hung around in the changing-rooms of the MCA Stadium for many hours following the fall of the last wicket and were heard singing raucously even long after the Pune sun had disappeared behind the hills for good. The underdogs from Down Under had just bitten into the No.1 Test team’s incredible unbeaten run and sounded like they would be keen for a “hair of the dog” remedy come Sunday morning.

The middle-order collapse might not have been statistically as dramatic as the first innings, when India lost 7 for 11 but 7 for 30 is bad enough. It was one of those abject displays that we’ve seen from Indian teams overseas where the wheels don’t just come off, they seem to have been never installed in the first place.

Unlike the first innings where he fell to a loose swipe off Mitchell Starc, Kohli hung around for a while here. The pitch was only getting tougher. And the Australian spin duo was on a roll. The openers had not only come and gone with no impact; they’d also taken the two DRS reviews with them. Kohli plodded and prodded for a few balls. But like the other Indian batsmen he too seemed to have not picked up from Smith’s excellent exhibition of batting against spin earlier in the day. Rather than stay back and play the ball late, he kept lunging forward and looking to put bat to ball rather than the other way around. That is before he shouldered arms. The other batsmen simply surrendered without a trace of defiance.

Steve O’Keefe picked up six wickets in both the innings of the first Test. (Source: Reuters)

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As he walked back following his worst-ever performance in a Test on home soil, you wonder what would have hurt Kohli more. That their batsmen ineptly succumbed on a rank-turner to a late-bloomer who had been sidelined by his own country as someone who couldn’t turn the ball; or the fact that he and Nathan Lyon out-bowled India’s elite-level spinners, ranked No.1 and 2 in the world?

For every big knock that Kohli has played, Ashwin has matched him with the ball in the company of Ravindra Jadeja. But here in Pune, despite all the cards seemingly stacked in his favour, the record-breaking off-spinner simply didn’t manage to get on top of the Aussies as he had the other teams. He did end up with wickets, seven of them in all, but that was inevitable on this wicket. That he simply couldn’t adjust his length accordingly like the Aussies did and run through them like O’Keefe did should rank this performance — even if he might have recorded his worst figures in Chennai — as the most disappointing for the season. Jadeja seemed equally stubborn in not shifting his length to slightly fuller and he kept beating the bat more often than being productive.

Kohli though didn’t seem to find anything wrong with his bowlers and felt that it was the batting that had to carry the blame for India’s second-biggest loss in a home Test. He even quipped about how his spinners had turned the ball more than the Aussies but still seen their spinners take more wickets.

Kohli also played down the magnitude of the defeat even slipping in a “no big deal, it was just another international game” when asked about the collapse and called it a “reality check”.

And the Indian team even tried to put up a brave face by indulging in a game of keep-uppy for some 20 minutes after the crowd had cleared.

But on a day they conquered Fort Virat and beat India at their own game, it was the Aussies who were upping their spirits, now with the belief that they could actually dare to even think about winning this series.