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Journalism of Courage
Australia can be funny at times. When you go from Adelaide to Brisbane you are in fact flying eastwards, which should ideally mean you’re gaining time. But you reach Brissy, as they call it here, and realize you’ve lost half-hour, and that you are another hour closer to the Indian Standard Time (IST) as compared to Sydney and Melbourne. The story goes that Queensland failed to implement daylight savings time because the cattle farmers in the area felt that it would affect their cows. Even more bizarrely, that decision is also supposed to have been influenced by complaints from housewives that their curtains would fade.
It’s a conundrum as baffling as the trend of off-spinners becoming the new nemesis for Indian batsmen outside the subcontinent. If in England it was Mooen Ali, who ran amok, Nathan Lyon etched himself into the history books on Saturday by becoming the first finger-spinner since Allan Border to take a 10-wicket match haul in Australia for 25 years. So how is it that the traditional past-masters of dealing with spin bowling have repeatedly floundered against?
Kohli had brought them agonizingly close to a myth-shattering win. The fact that it wasn’t to be though had a lot to do with how the visitors dealt with Lyon. Coming to Australia, few could look beyond Mitchell Johnson and Ryan Harris when it came to being the chief tormentors with the ball. Probably the Indian team was of the same opinion and they clearly overlooked the threat that Lyon could pose, especially on a pitch with venomous rough.
No Indian batsmen epitomized their travails as much as Cheteshwar Pujara. In most circles, the Saurashtra run-machine is considered the one man to have on your side when faced with a sticky wicket. But at Adelaide, Pujara was all at sea against the South Australian off-spinner.
LESSONS TO BE LEARNT
It was more a case of technical nous than anything else. Pujara plays spin like most Indians do. Put your front-foot out and then deal with whatever the ball does. But what he didn’t account for was the additional bounce of the Australian pitches, and the skill of Lyon to get the ball to dip from a trajectory and jump off the wicket. He continued to play spin like he would in Rajkot with low hands, and as a result the ball kept jumping off a length and hitting the bat-handle, his gloves or at times even his abdomen.
Thirty per cent of the 29 dot balls he faced from Lyon missed his bat as he stood in defence. If in the first essay he could only score 10 off 38 balls against off-spin, Lyon allowed him only five scoring-shots out of 26 balls in the second.
Pujara’s response to dealing with the rough was coming down the wicket, like he had incessantly against the same bowler last year when Australia were in India.
A couple of skips down the track did pay dividends, as Lyon pitched it short and gave Pujara some width. He was then lured into another step down the wicket, finally tried to launch into a cover-drive but was beaten, and the ball caught the inside-edge.
The next delivery he was stuck in his crease, poking tentatively and the ball hit the inside-edge then his bottom and rolled onto the stumps. It was similar to the half-cock defence he offered in the second innings, this time the ball catching the outside-edge of his bat and having him caught-behind. Pujara was playing for the rough but the ball didn’t turn in. it went straight on, and took the edge on its way. It was similar to the way he had fallen to Moeen at Southampton. Or the way he was bowled by Lyon in Delhi last year.
As far as numbers go, Pujara wasn’t in control of every fourth delivery he faced from Lyon.
At the other end, Kohli was in discomfort for not more than four deliveries in his whole innings. Vijay attempted 17 sweeps on Day 5. He scored 10 runs off those, and wasn’t in control of at least eight of them. Two sneaked under his bat, three were almost top-edged to leg-slip or the short fine-leg-even once when he was on 99. In contrast, Kohli scored 20 runs with the sweep off Lyon in 10 balls. He swept from outside off, even when the ball pitched in the rough, and was successful on all but one occasion. His success-rate with the sweep was completely an outcome of him reaching the pitch of the ball and negating any untoward spin there could have been.
It was also a result of a very dogged and positive mindset.
Vijay’s issues unlike Pujara’s weren’t so much about low hands as they were about picking the length. He smashed Lyon for three sixes across the two innings, each time jumping out of the crease and launching him over the wide long-on region.
But Lyon left him with two left feet at the crease quite often too as Vijay misjudged the length of the ball. Like when he padded up to a full delivery and Marais Erasmus handed him a reprieve much to the chagrin of every Australian present at the Adelaide Oval.
The sweep-shots he attempted were premeditated, with the opener plonking his foot down first without conviction or craft and then trying to manufacture a shot from there, regardless of where the ball had pitched.
SWEPT OVER
As was the case with Rohit Sharma. Rarely will you find the Mumbai right-hander mistime a sweep in the subcontinent. But here, at times he was almost trying to sweep ‘on the up’. Moreover, he also seemed to suffer from a lack of creative ideas after he’d stepped out of his crease. It looked more like he was out for a stroll down the wicket than to get himself some runs. It was no surprise that he lobbed back a full delivery from Lyon back to the bowler.
Probably India’s concerns against spin stem from the fact that they don’t get to face much quality spin back home in the domestic circuit. Not many with the ability of Lyon anyway with more or less each Ranji team possessing a spinner darting it in from a round-arm action. The stress on having more green wickets for the domestic competitions might also have played a part.
Ideally, India would have left Brisbane for Adelaide, probably glad that the pace and fire of the Aussies was behind them. But instead they arrived in the Queensland capital not just adjusting their watches but also with their preferences changed. For, it seems they would prefer pace and fire over Lyon.
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