HOBART, DECEMBER 19: From an Indian point of view, this four-day practice game is turning out to be a disaster. First, there was this late order batting failure that undid the hard labour put in by Rahul Dravid. Then followed an unbeaten opening partnership of 166 runs between the Tasmanian openers, Jamie Cox and Dean Hills yesterday.There was no change of fortune today. Cox went on to make a century and in the afternoon, Daniel Marsh, son of former Australian wicket-keeper Rodney Marsh, made an entertaining third hundred of the match off 123 deliveries and saw his team end third day's play in a comfortable position.With a score of 472 for four wickets, the Tasmanians are 156 runs ahead and if Cox's post match comments are to be taken seriously that his team wants to win the match then a declaration is likely to take place tomorrow morning. Cox did not declare his innings today: ``We are not here to provide the Indians with practice, we are here to give them hard time.''The Indian bowlers gotplenty of that. The Bellerive wicket, except for a couple of hours on the opening day, has turned out to be one of those Indian wickets where the batsmen can put their left foot forward and play any kind of stroke they want to.It did not have much bounce, turn or movement. The cold weather was not of much help and the result was a hard grind for the bowlers and fielders. But none of the bowlers strived hard to produce something extra.Cox scored his 30th first class hundred and is now 42 runs short of 10,000 first class runs. He shared a double hundred opening wicket partnership with Dean Hill. The pair looked like going on and on had Hill not run himself out. The Indians got another wicket with the addition of 22 runs but had to strive for more.The short, stocky Marsh is in contention for a place in the Australian team, at least for the one-dayers and today, he walloped the ball quite hard, smacking Vijay Bhardawaj whose fastish off-breaks fetched him two wickets high over the mid-wicketfence.De Vinuto was the only Tasmanian batsman who missed out in the batting feast and with just a day left, the Indians have done more harm than good to their sagging spirits.ScoreboardIndia (Ist innings): 316-9 declaredTasmania: J Cox c V Prasad b Ganguly 139, D Hill run out 84, De Vinuto c Mongia b Bharadwaj 12, A Dykes lbw Bhardwaj 61, D Marsh batting 118, S Young batting 32; Extras (lb7, w5, nb14) 26.Total (for 4 wickets) 472.Fall of wickets: 1-205, 2-227, 3-277, 4-381.Bowling: V Prasad 21-5-52-0, Mohanty 26-7-81-0, Ganguly 11-0-42-1, Kumaran 23-6-90-0, Harbhajan Singh 38-4-108-0, Bharadwaj 25-2-84-2, Kanitkar 4-0-8-0.
