JOIN USAustralia draw the Lyon, India adamant
Were India counting chickens before they hatched? They had harboured grandiose plans of playing the final Test in Ahmedabad on a green top, ostensibly to acclimatise themselves to the conditions in England where the World Test Championship (WTC) final will be played from June 7-11.
Having won the first two Tests with surprising ease, they were perhaps a touch overconfident, if not complacent, of beating Australia in the third Test and ensuring a passage to the WTC final. Little did India realise they would be administered a dose of their own medicine.
As it turned out here on Friday's third day, Australia, chasing a 76-run target, cantered to a nine-wicket win here at the Holkar Cricket Stadium to become the first team to qualify for the WTC final. Though a second-ball dismissal of opener Usman Khawaja off R Ashwin had the crowd excited, it turned out to be a false dawn.
Travis Head (49) and Marnus Labuschagne (28) survived some anxious moments before forging a 78-run stand for the unbroken second wicket to signal there is a lot of fight left in them as the tourists look to level the series.
This was Australia's first win in India since they beat the hosts during their 2017 tour. That win came in similar conditions in Pune where a rank turner, some crafty bowling and shoddy batting combined to spell India's doom. The similarities don't end there though - in both matches Steve Smith was the captain and former England cricketer Chris Broad the match referee who had given the Pune pitch a "poor" rating.
While Broad's verdict is awaited, there's little doubt that this was the dodgiest pitch of the series yet and the Indian batting once again crumbled against a set of spinners who exploited the conditions better than the home bowlers. Rohit Sharma, however, insisted spin bowling and batting depth were India's strengths.
"We want to play to our strength, and that strength is spin bowling and that batting depth," the skipper emphasised. "And everyone uses that advantage outside, so what’s wrong in that? We’ve got to do that as well, especially when we’re getting results. If we were not getting the results, I would think otherwise, but I think we are playing well, we are getting the results that we want.
"Some batters are under pressure, but that’s okay. You cannot have all members of your team in good form, having a great time in the middle. That’s not going to happen. Even when you play outside, it’s not going to happen, so a few guys will go through that rough patch, but that’s okay."
There is nothing wrong in preparing pitches that give you the best chance to win, but that rationale has to be based on sound reality. And the reality is India haven't been good enough on surfaces that have offered excessive turn. Pune and Indore Tests are testimonies to that.
While the current Indian batting line-up will go down as one of India's finest, the same can't be said about its ability to play spin in red-ball cricket. The table shows, barring Rishabh Pant, Shubman Gill and Ravindra Jadeja, most Indian top-order batters have a better record against seam than spin.
This was one match where the lower-order couldn't get runs that they had consistently in the first two Tests, and the result went the other way. Rohit did admit the batting was a big let down but he didn't agree the batters' skills against spin were suspicious.
"Look, when you play on challenging pitches, batters will be challenged," he offered. "That is the nature of it, the reason being obviously people have to find their way of doing it. It’s not like people have not scored in these conditions. When we look back at some of the Test matches that we’ve played before – England, South Africa – guys have got runs, big runs as well. It’s just that people will have the phase where the runs are not coming, but that doesn’t really matter, honestly."