It is remarkable how an old narrative of turning pitches on which wristy Indian batsmen and big turning Indian spinners send the opponents hurtling to oblivion can sometimes turn on its head and provide a completely different perspective altogether. Sport wouldn’t be sport if it didn’t throw up such surprises. But then it does take a remarkable personality to adapt his skill sets to the situation as it exists on designer pitches in India and come up with a definitive contribution in a team game to fashion the unthinkable. The Aussies found their man of the hour in their celebrated captain Steve Smith.
One of the last of such upset results hinged on the classic innings of Kevin Piestersen in Mumbai five years ago. He propelled England to a total big enough to force India to bite the dust even as spinners Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar outperformed the Indian spinners. The turnaround was so complete that England went on to win the series, beating India on a far better pitch in Kolkata to go up 2-1. That series win came to England in India after 28 years. The Australians have had to wait 13 years before they could find the formula to upend the Indians in a Test match on another of the famous Bunsen Burners of India.
Someone counted that it was 4,502 days since the Aussies won a Test here. Also, Smith was only the third to score a century in an Australian second innings in India and we are talking in terms of six decades of Tests here since the Oz first came out here in 1955-56. The Indians may have been far behind in the first innings itself as they lost the grip on the match when Mitchell Starc set about them with a nice touch of attacking batting in an adventurous manner. The critics could rage against KL Rahul’s ballooned hit which led to a sensational collapse, but then we can only blame the fact that Indians are not exactly great batsmen on nasty turners.
The manner in which Smith scraped his runs together showed how much resilience was needed for anyone to survive in the conditions. The Indians dropped him on several occasions, but do you blame the visiting captain for making capital of the chances and shutting India out? During all the prattle about fourth innings targets and India’s great shows in the distant past in such matters, I offered the opinion that Team India would struggle to pass its measly first innings total. There were some hard stares in the club that day on such a prediction. You could simply say that the task was far beyond that of a young team so dependent on one brilliant Test batsman.
Before the match there was much talk of how Indian spinners undercut the ball and so are more successful than those of visiting teams. What Steve O’Keefe did on a square turner was to drop the ball on the spot and more often slide the ball into the right handers so that they had to play him rather than be like Jadeja who bowled brilliantly but kept beating the outside edge more often than even the computer pitch maps could count and remember. O’Keefe’s was a performance that was great in conditions presented. What more can a spinner worth his salt do than to keep pegging away and wait for the batsmen to destroy themselves?
Left armer Iqbal Qasim did this to India in 1986 in the famous Bangalore Test while his off spinner colleague Tauseef Ahmed bowled virtual bouncers from the other end. Graeme Swann turned the ball big while Monty kept it on a neat line and length in 2012, mixing in plenty of armers too. O’Keefe beat them all with the best figures ever for a visiting spinner in 85 years. The Aussie quicks generally did all the hard work in the 2004-05 series, with the prince among spinners Shane Warne playing a rare supporting role, but then even he was in decline in those days. He only picked two wickets apiece in each of the four innings in the triumphs in Bangalore and Nagpur when Australia conquered the “Final Frontier’ as they called it.
The Oz conquered that frontier on a pitch on which all the grass has been left on and Sourav Ganguly was said to have walked off in a huff although the official reason given was ‘back trouble’. That was the time BCCI politics was raging between East and West and Nagpur, most central of all Indian cities, swung it away from the East by putting up a pitch that would have done a curator in Leeds or Manchester proud. Out in Pune, we had the driest of turners which held signs of an early finish from ball one, with a spinner bowling just the seventh ball of the innings.
So what is Team India going to do from here — send the national curator scouting for more horrid Bunsen Burners or will they sensibly opt for better wickets to give themselves a breather from the horrors of Pune? Early reports have it that Bengaluru is preparing a sporting pitch even as the match referee Chris Broad has come to the correct conclusion that the Pune pitch was below Test standards. There are lessons to be learnt, but how soon this one about pitches will sink on team India is anybody’s guess.
