Test cricket fans in India associate a certain sense of romance with the Australian summer. The Indian team’s tours down under roughly every four years have remained among the better things to look forward to in the Test calendar. The period coincides with winter in India and the mood is set just about right for some early morning – often too early – cricket while covered in a blanket and the television volume set low. Big and beautiful grounds, lush and smooth outfields accentuated in their effect by the quality of broadcast, fast and bouncy pitches assisting the tall, menacing fast bowlers, and the electric action being called by the unmistakably familiar Channel 9 legends like Richie Benaud, Bill Lawry, and Ian Chappell.
The experience of Test cricket in Australia is so persuasively packaged and sold, it subliminally registers as superior to what you get to witness elsewhere. Add to it, the cricket community has for the longest time held Australia as the ultimate barometer of quality to measure any team against. And therefore despite the Indian team’s largely indifferent outings outside the last two, the Australia tours continue to hold a very distinct place in Indian cricket fandom.
The systemic limitations that cricketers from the relatively weaker nations had to contend with prevented the Indian teams of past from feeling at ease on tough away assignments. And therefore barring the preternaturally gifted ones like Sachin Tendulkar, the batting unit of the 90s and before looked spectacularly out of depth when dealing with extra pace and bounce on those flat and hard surfaces. With little familiarity to the conditions, the Indian fast bowlers too found it impossibly hard to adjust their lengths and in the process leaked too many runs before figuring what worked.
But as the BCCI evolved into a money-spinning beast exerting monopolistic control over the sport, the Indian players too found life much easier. The tours to the first-world countries became much more frequent. The players on these tours now had little to worry outside calibrating their techniques to suit to the conditions.
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There was a time in Indian cricket when two successive tours to Australia would be too spaced out for the same group of players to even hope to feature in both let alone fix their flaws on the second. That time is of course long gone now. Money and clout have lent Indian cricketers the bandwidth to maximise their output in a way the previous generations could never even have dreamed of. And that’s certainly reflecting in the way India performs on these once dreaded tours now.
When Rishabh Pant hit the winning runs at Brisbane in early 2021 to complete a truly monumental series win down under, it signalled a complete transition in the way this rivalry would be spoken of for the years to come. A lot was said and written in the days that followed. But that victory at the Gabba pretty much confirmed that going ahead, India would start every series they played in Australia on an even footing – even a humiliating whitewash in a home series weeks before the next instalment won’t deter that bit.
Normally, a team going on one of the toughest overseas assignments right after hitting what many described as its lowest point should be deemed as a complete pushover. And you couldn’t have been faulted for thinking of this Indian side that way after witnessing its capitulation in Mumbai in the most recent Test they played.
But despite the overbearing clamouring around this team’s decline and missing a few key players including the captain Rohit Sharma going into the opening Test at Perth, nothing really screamed an imminent drubbing. A 295-run India win may not have been the safest of bets but being dismissive of their prospects is not an option India have left on the table anymore, not in Australia anyway.
It’s not like India have evolved into an untameable giant that no longer is constrained by pitches and conditions. There’s plenty of cracks that are routinely papered over by some individual piece of brilliance on every other tour. But this particular unit has very specifically cracked the Australia code like no other team in contemporary cricket has.
It’s happened on the back of coming together of relentlessly accurate fast bowlers who’ve learned the art of bowling into the pitch. Every Australian summer you could see the visiting bowlers painfully struggle to find the three-quarter length the way Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood do. But inevitably their lengths are too short for the most part before dishing out half-volleys that the hosts pounce on.
India have very smartly given up on rushing the Australian batsmen with extra bounce and instead stuck to what they know best – bowl straight and keep stumps in play at all times. For the third tour in a row, this method has delivered beyond the best of anyone’s expectations. India successfully put a chokehold on the flow of runs and force Australia into finding runs in areas they haven’t necessarily had to explore against other teams.
There’s a marked difference in how the Australian batting fares against other teams compared to how they find their scoring options severely strangulated when they play India. This is so unbelievably detached from the reality of tours as recent as 2014-15 when the Indian attack – of creditable repute – looked so woefully out of place.
Fans used to dread having to wake up in those winter mornings and open their TV with squinted eyes in the hope of a scorecard that didn’t loudly scream disgrace. For those familiar with the ignominy of the 2011-12 tour, Michael Clarke is still probably batting in some alternate universe. And Ishant Sharma is still figuring out what’s full enough without being too full.
Australia for the longest time has been associated with their inherent supremacy in the imagination of the Indian public; that you may have your moments against them but it’s a matter of time before they show up and you realise how big the gap is. There’s always been that air of inevitability around the Australian narrative with men like Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist, and Glenn McGrath beaming main-character energy.
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Not that the Indian team of the time was entirely unremarkable in its being but the aura of the Australians was too overwhelming to be undone. The Indian fan had taken one blow too many to see the Australian tours with anything other than an extended period of sorrow and discontentment. Even if an occasional Test result went their team’s way, it’d be overcompensated by the hosts in the ODI tri-series that followed.
The aura and grandiose of Australian cricket of course subsided with the end of that generation. And while the current one may not be perceived quite the same way but are no lesser in pedigree. The likes of Steve Smith and Pat Cummins are not your everyday cricketers; both are unqualifiedly among the greatest to have played the game in fact.
And after India’s landmark series win in 2018-19 therefore, some of those hardcoded beliefs pertaining to the ‘impossible Aussies’ ought to have changed a bit. Not a seismic one, but change nonetheless. But, that India actually managed to repeat the feat two years later fundamentally redefined this rivalry perhaps forever.
India had long attained the right of being regarded as an equal in this contest but they probably merit more now. The edge they hold over Australia deserves to be much more assertively acknowledged. Australia haven’t had a sniff at this trophy for 10 years and even their latest quest to reverse this trend has started on a losing note in Perth.
A solitary win is of course nowhere close to being an indication of a third straight away series win. India’s bowling stocks are pretty nascent this time and the shaky-looking batting may not get another chance to bat on a completely placid pitch as they did in Perth. With a superior overall pedigree for the conditions, Australia still remain favourites by a considerable margin.
But the defeat in Perth has pushed the hosts in an unfamiliar territory of having to stage a comeback to win at home. More importantly, it has once again reaffirmed that India is steadily forming a habit of winning Tests in Australia; that these wins are coming a little too regularly to be treated as headline events anymore.
Many years ago, a young Indian captain MS Dhoni had asked his dressing room to not break into rapturous celebrations upon beating Australia in an ODI match. Even white-ball wins in Australia didn’t come as cheap then as they do now. But Dhoni wanted to make a clear statement; that India no longer is overly excited at the unexpectedness of a result like this, that his team is perfectly capable of repeating it at will.
A lot of time has passed since. Many Australia tours have taken place since. But India has evolved from celebrating an odd win here and there to being a juggernaut that unlike any other team in the world, shares roughly the same odds as the hosts every time they play a Test in Australia.
It’s perhaps taken a few generations too many but it’s finally reached a point where Test matches in Australia are finally not just about the aesthetics of broadcast. There’s plenty of cricket too that’s worth beating the winter blues for. Of course Benaud, Lawry, and Chappell still calling the games wouldn’t have hurt.