India vs Australia: Can Pat Cummins and Co. conquer 'final frontier'?

For Australia, India still remains the Final Frontier. For more than 50 years since Bill Lawry’s team pulled off a 3-1 victory in 1969-70, it has tilted at the windmills, mostly with little joy. Apart from an isolated 2-1 victory in 2004, it has come out second best, coming unstuck through a combination of India’s near-invincibility at home, its own misgivings about this country and the gremlins of self-doubt that have germinated at the first instance of having been pushed on to the mental backfoot.

Not even the multiple visits to India in the last quarter of a century, or significant representation in the Indian Premier League (IPL), served to explode the myth and mysticism in Aussie minds when it comes to India. They have lost each of their last four series here, winning just one of 14 Tests since 2008. That’s in stark contrast to India’s recent record in Australia, which reads ‘W’ and ‘W’ in the last two series Down Under.

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So, why does Australia believe – sincerely so – that its time is now?

Inexperienced Australian batting

For one thing, it is coming off the experience of subcontinental conditions in the recent past, drawing 1-1 in Sri Lanka and defeating Pakistan 1-0 in 2022. Pat Cummins, the side’s admirable skipper, believes those two outings should compensate for the fact that several of the top order, David Warner and Steve Smith excepted, haven’t played Test cricket in India. “(Also) everyone’s played ODI cricket over here or been on tour with Australia ‘A’ tour,” Cummins said a day before the first Test, beginning in Nagpur on Thursday (February 9). “That’s what the last seven days have been – really good preparation. Although we might not have played games, we are really accustomed to these conditions now.”

Australia’s preparations entailed arriving in Bengaluru at the beginning of February and having a five-day camp at the Karnataka State Cricket Association’s (KSCA) Alur facility. Believing that that would serve their purpose better than an ‘irrelevant’ practice game, they worked on their skills against spin on roughed up surfaces against a wide variety of Indian spinners, first-class cricketers and otherwise. They even found a tenuous R Ashwin lookalike in Mahesh Pithiya, a Baroda off-spinner, whose services they have requisitioned until the beginning of the second Test in Delhi. They feel they have most bases covered so far as tackling the turning ball is concerned, though whether their meticulous attention to detail will bear fruit remains to be seen.

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One of the great things about cricket is that the best laid plans can go horribly astray in the blink of an eye. Whether, in that eventuality, Australia is able to hold its nerve and poise and bounce back from a bad session or a bad day will decide how well it goes over the next five weeks. That it possesses immense quality is not in question, but then again, that never has been. How well the Australians are able to tap into that quality in adversity is what the big question is.

Australia will be handicapped by the absence of three first-choice players for the first Test – all-rounder Cameron Green, and pacemen Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood. That might suggest India has a glorious chance to land the early heavy punches, but what’s that we said about the best laid plans?

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India has injury concerns of its own, with Shreyas Iyer out for this game (and perhaps the next) with a back injury and Rishabh Pant unavailable for at least the next few months. That hasn’t just taken two flair batsmen out of the equation, but also two of the best negotiators of the turning ball within the Indian set-up. The left-handed Pant and the right-handed Iyer are positive, quick on their feet and always thinking runs, which has made them a formidable combination at home, especially. There are no like-for-like replacements and so India will have to come up with an altered middle-order game plan. But it has plenty of nous up front and loads of all-round options lower down in a game where every run will be like gold dust, and where batting is expected to become harder the longer the match progresses.

How will India tackle spin challenge?

It’s no secret, however much the individuals concerned might protest otherwise, that India’s stock has declined considerably in the last decade or so when it comes to playing spin, and not necessarily of the highest quality, on even slightly dodgy surfaces. Gone are the days when Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, VVS Laxman, Sourav Ganguly and current head coach Rahul Dravid would skip down the track, trusting their footwork, to throw the spinners off kilter. Few, if any, possess anywhere near the wherewithal, say, of a Sunil Gavaskar, who negotiated Tauseef Ahmed and Iqbal Qasim with consummate ease on a veritable minefield of an M Chinnaswamy Stadium surface in Bengaluru in what turned out to be his final Test innings in 1987, when he made the best 96 in the history of the game.

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With the honourable exception of Cheteshwar Pujara, there is a certain visible apprehension when presented with a spin challenge, of which Nathan Lyon will substantially be. Perhaps that’s got something to do with the fact that the likes of Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and KL Rahul hardly play domestic cricket, and therefore have lost touch with playing spin on deteriorating surfaces. Nowhere have the travails been more stark than when it comes to Kohli. The former skipper, who has averaged less than 30 in Test cricket in each of the last three calendar years, has found length-picking too much of an ask and therefore made bowlers appear far more potent than they are. It will be incumbent upon him to translate his excellent recent white-ball form into meaningful Test runs – he hasn’t made a hundred in the five-day game since November 2019 – and who knows, the sight of the old foe might just be the trigger he needs to stack up home hundreds against the Aussies. After all, six of his seven centuries against them have come in Australia.

Australia is wary of the spin threat R Ashwin and company pose, but in the past, India has seen its designs spectacularly backfire, not least in Pune in 2017 when left-arm spinner Steve O’Keefe took 12 for 70 to bowl Australia to a 333-run rout. Which way will the cookie crumble – pun unintended – this time around?