Two teams with fault lines in their batting, up against two of the best bowling sides in the game today -- the question that determines the outcome is, is your weakness greater than mine?
Morning session
The first session of play, particularly in a low-scoring game, was always going to be key -- and here in Sydney, the first ten overs of play on day two produced 31 runs but more crucially, three top order Aussie wickets to put India right back in the contest.
Jasprit Bumrah started it off, doing Bumrah things. After one over to find his rhythm, he shifted to a fuller length and came closer to the stumps, drawing Marnus Labuschagne forward and swinging the ball away from off. The umpire didn't hear the snick but Bumrah and the cordon did, and reviewed successfully (Australia 15/2, Labuschagne 2 off 8).
It was Mohammed Siraj, though, who made the difference. He got the ball to swing, which is no surprise -- the difference here was that he increased his length by about a foot, and shifted his line closer to off, making the batsman play a lot more.
Sam Konstas looked more subdued this morning, less inclined to respond to provocations by the Indian close cordon, Shubman Gill and Yashasvi Jaiswal in particular. In between solid defence, he smeared Bumrah through mid off on the charge and ramped him to third man. And then he aimed a booming square drive at a ball from Siraj; the lateral movement found the edge to Jaiswal in the gully. (Konstas 23 off 83, Australia 35/3).
Travis Head on drove the first ball he faced for four. Siraj promptly upped the length, pitched leg and middle and straightened it around off to find the edge to K L Rahul at second slip. (Head 4 in 2 balls, 4/39 Australia).
At that point, India had clawed the game back, in a reprise of the Perth first innings heroics -- and the big difference was Siraj, who bowled a superb spell in the first hour. He operated at his best pace, the lengths were calibrated to make the batsman play, the lines were closer to off, and he had the ball on a string, swinging it away late and repeatedly turning batsmen inside out.
Not for the first time for India, the third release came from the third bowler. With his height and high arm release, Prasidh Krishna gets bounce -- but almost no lateral movement. Steve Smith and debutant Beau Webster played the bounce, the former swinging a short arm pull over the square leg boundary and following up with a crashing square drive through point; Webster used his height to get on top of the bounce and pulled over midwicket.
Krishna's first spell of 5 overs went for 21 -- a concern for the fielding side, given the modest total they have to defend. The second hour's play underlined the problem of a low first innings score -- in the session preceding drinks, with wickets falling in a cluster, the Indians could attack.
But once Webster and Smith settled into their work and the runs began to come, the field had to be diluted; the Indians needed to defend runs; and that took some of the sting off the bowlers, who no longer had the luxury of a thickly populated cordon to back up their attacking lines and lengths.
This was most noticeably in Siraj's second spell -- the bowler, who in the first hour had attacked the edge, had to increase his length and bowl to the stumps, rather than try for the outer edge.
The in-out field also meant that both batsmen could work singles on either side of the wicket -- and with each such run, you saw the energy visibly drain from the fielding side.
With both Siraj and Bumrah tiring, the captain had to turn to Nitish Reddy for a few overs. Nominally an all-rounder, the youngster's bowling is not -- at least, not yet -- deserving of the tag.
He bowls in the low 120s, without any noticeable ability to swing the ball around -- easy pickings for good batsmen, and in his third over, Webster took him for a four through point, then Smith for two more, one behind point, the other straight back down the track, all runs India couldn't afford.
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The third bowler problem, which I had written about in a session recap yesterday, now came into sharp relief, as the fifth wicket partnership first stemmed the rot, then began to flourish.
When the wicket came, almost on the stroke of lunch, it was against the run of play. Krishna bowled a fairly innocuous delivery; the only notable feature was that it was pitched further up around off.
The length, from a bowler who routinely hits the deck around the three quarter mark, likely surprised Smith who got stuck in no man's land, neither forward nor back, and played a nothing push that guided the ball to Rahul at second slip. (Smith 33 off 57, Australia 96/5, the partnership 57 off 92).
That wicket again swung the momentum India's way; the close cordon became a bit more populous and Siraj came back for another go as lunch neared.
Webster, on debut, showed to advantage. His movements are compact and decisive off either foot; the defence, taking advantage of his long reach, solid; his choice of the ball to hit spot on. Early days, but based on his showing thus far with ball and now bat, you had to think Australia missed a bet delaying his debut as long as they did.
The pitch has changed a bit in character. The moisture has been wicked off, making the surface harder and and quicker. The occasional trampoline bounce is more pronounced -- there was one ball from Krishna, in his first over, that stood up from just back of length and jammed Smith's top hand on the bat handle. The right-hander, who averages over 70 on his home ground, was visibly surprised by the very un-SCG-like behaviour.
To get back into the game, India needed to win the first session. It did, emphatically, with four wickets for 92 runs -- and it was all due to the fact that bowlers whose name is not Jasprit Bumrah got among the wickets. At the break, Australia trailed by 84, with half the side back in the hut. And what this has done is put the possibility of Australia running up a sizable lead out of the question.
Post-lunch session
This grueling series, now into its final phase, has been a contest not so much of strengths as of weaknesses of both skill and of the mind. It's the individual and collective frailties, on stark display before record crowds, that have made this edition of the Border Gavaskar Trophy such compelling viewing.
Two teams with fault lines in their batting, up against two of the best bowling sides in the game today -- the question that determines the outcome is, is your weakness greater than mine?
At this point in the game, there really is nothing in it, no clear distinction, at least as far as the batting is concerned, between either side. And that perhaps explains why the game is in a state of equipoise at the end of five sessions of play.
Prasidh Krishna bowls in the high 130s, occasionally topping the 140k mark -- but in terms of line, his first line is also his last line, there is no noticeable deviation in the air or off the seam.
This means the batsmen are able to play that first line and to commit purely on length.
Absent seam, the option of targeting the outside edge was taken out of the equation; his go-to ploy was to target the stumps, but that allowed the batsmen to get behind the line and either defend, or push into the outfield where there were runs on offer against an in-out field. It didn't help that when you bowl into the stumps as opposed to through the channel, you allow batsmen to access both sides of the field.
On paper, India came into the second session with the upper hand -- but every run taken was one less off a below-par Indian total, and that showed in the way the fielding side tried to hedge his bets, keeping a couple in the cordon but spreading the rest out in a bid to limit the potential damage.
Against that Indian vulnerability, on a pitch that under the sun was settling down, the Australian pair of Carey and Webster started out positive.
Worryingly for India, Bumrah went off the field after just one over -- the reason why is unclear, but the one over he did bowl after lunch was very unlike him, yielding six runs including a back foot square drive by Carey when Bumrah, unusually for him, offered width outside off.
He came back ten minutes later, but looked visibly under the weather. He had a long chat with Virat Kohli, and left the field again, with Kohli taking over captaincy duties and relying on Pant as his aide de camp.
Relief for India came thanks to Krishna's habit of producing a wicket against the run of play.
Carey looked in fluent form, dominating a 41 run partnership for the sixth wicket (Carey 21 off 36, Webster 14 off 29) that took chunks out of the deficit when Krishna, going around the wicket, produced the seam bowler's magic ball out of the blue: Fuller in length, on middle/off line, straightening past Carey's defensive bat and hitting top of off. (137/6).
In pitch-watch, the problem for both sides is that while they haven't opened out, the vertical cracks down the length of the wicket are increasingly pronounced, and visible beneath the grass cover. And every so often when a ball hits one of those cracks, it stands up on the batsman -- there was a Prasidh Krishna ball, for instance, that landed just back of length, and flew past the nose of the tall Beau Webster standing up to his full, considerable height (That's nearly six-and-a-half feet of bounce from a not so short length).
Immediately after the drinks break, the very impressive Webster stood tall and crashed Nitish Reddy through the covers to bring up his debut fifty (92 balls, 5 fours but also 15 singles, seven twos and a three testifying to his ability to keep the board moving).
Reddy, like Krishna earlier, then conjured up a wicket out of the blue. One ball after being creamed through the covers, Reddy bowled a bit wider of the off stump and Pat Cummins went hard at it, only to get the outer edge for Kohli, at first slip, to hold a sharp catch as the ball flew past to his wrong side. (Cummins 10 off 20, Australia 162/7).
Reddy struck with the very next ball -- the first of his next over -- when he found Mitchell Starc's edge for Rahul to pull off the hardest act in slip catching -- diving forward to take as the ball is dying on him.
What did for Starc was that uneven bounce -- the ball stood up off length to hit the high part of the bat, taking the batsman by surprise. Nathan Lyon took a single off the hat trick ball.
With two wickets under his belt, Krishna got the wind in his sails. In the very next over, Krishna made one kick off a length -- even the tall Webster was taken aback by the bounce, very close in line to off, and could only fend at it for Jaiswal at gully to continue India's excellent catching in the cordon (Webster 57 off 105, Australia 166/9).
At that point, a 15-ball period had produced three wickets for just four runs, turning the game entirely in India's favour.
The last wicket pair of Lyon and Scott Boland, that had done much to put Australia in pole position in the fourth Test and frustrated India, got together again -- and again, the Indians inexplicably had in-out fields, with runs on offer on both sides, rather than attack flat-out to get that last wicket.
Siraj came back for another spell -- and got Boland bowled through the gate to end Australia's innings on 181, a deficit of four runs. Boland and Lyon put on 15 off 22 balls at the fag end of the innings -- and in a game of this kind, even 15 is crucial.
Tea was taken at the fall of that last wicket -- the second that India has won in succession. The second session produced 5 wickets for 80 runs, following on from a first session that yielded 92 runs for four wickets.
The first two sessions underlined the cricketing adage that you never judge a pitch till both sides have batted on it.
The best way I know to sum up the two innings is that Australia got the best of the bowling conditions and used them beautifully, whereas India used the available conditions better.
And most significantly, all of India's support seamers delivered -- the single factor that has helped the tourists restore parity after an underwhelming first innings.
For once, eight of the wickets to fall went to bowlers whose name was not Jasprit Bumrah. Also for once, India was close to immaculate in the field -- two factors that made up for the absence of the star spearhead.
Post-tea session
The first five overs of India's first innings had produced 11 runs and K L Rahul's wicket. The first five overs of the second innings produced 33 runs, studded with six boundaries.
It was as though the Indian team had, during the break, done an attitudinal reset. If the leave was the feature of the survivalist mindset of the first innings, here it was the flashing blade and the intent to cash in on anything that offered favourable length and/or width.
The other noticeable feature of the Indian batting here was a technical reset -- where in the first innings, and indeed almost throughout the series the Indians seemed intent to play off the front foot, here they parked themselves on top of the batting crease with the back foot going back as the default option.
This gave them more time to judge the ball, more control of their weight when they played their shots, and also put them in position to play the ball under their eyeline rather than reaching for it.
Thanks to some concern about the area where his front foot was landing, Starc bowled an indifferent first over characterised by width and a lack of movement.
Jaiswal slashed him over point for two successive fours, then square drove him through the same region for a third successive boundary, finishing off the over with a late weight transfer onto the back foot and a blistering cover drive. For his part,Rahul on-drove Cummins and played a controlled pull off Starc to contribute his share of boundaries in the opening passages.
The big difference between the opening passages of both innings was that the Indian openers, recognising that the bounce was likely to surprise them, opted to jettison their practice of coming down the wicket to the quicks, parked themselves on top of the crease, and played off the back foot whenever the length was anything short of good length.
Equally, the plan seemed to be to go after the bowling at the slightest opportunity. That mindset produced some airy heaves and flashing drives that were lucky to miss -- but it also produced runs and for Australia, that was a problem; they have to bat last, and this wicket is not going to be easy to chase anything like 250 on.
But that intent also produced the first wicket -- and, to no surprise, it was Scott Boland who broke through. Boland, who has spent the last 18 months on the bench, bowled the fuller length just outside off, shaping in.
Rahul, in keeping with the attacking mindset, drove where another time he might have defended on the front foot; the movement was just enough to take the inner edge and crash into the stumps. (India 42/1 in just 7.3 overs, Rahul 13 off 20).
Boland's length, unrelenting line through the channel and late movement with bounce dampened Jaiswal's adrenalin. It seemed just a matter of time -- and that time came with the fifth ball of his third over.
After four deliveries that tested Jaiswal through the channel, he then increased his length, changed his line to middle and off, straightened it past the defensive bat and hit top of off via a brush of the back pad. (Jaiswal 22 off 31, India 47/2).
Jaiswal was 20 off 19 when Boland came in to the attack; he bowled eight deliveries to the southpaw, conceded one run, and took him out with the eighth ball.
What was this guy doing on the bench for the last 18 months?
These days, a Virat Kohli innings plays out to a pattern. He walks out, takes a quick single, and commentators go into orgasms about how he looks ready, how he is up for a fight, how he brings energy to his work. He then hits a four -- here it was a short arm pull through mid on off Boland -- and cue more eulogies, with superlatives gushing out of the microphones in an endless stream.
And then he gets a ball in the channel -- here it was, for the second time this game, from Boland -- and prods it into the hands of the nearest slip fielder, in this case Smith at second. (Kohli 6 off 12, India 59/3.)
To the very next ball, Rishabh Pant danced down the wicket and smashed a good length ball into the crowd behind mid on. It was around this point that you ran out of words to process how this innings was shaping.
The Indian number five seems to have had enough of the chatter about how he should play. In the next over he chipped Cummins for a brace, then flipped him from off to leg for a four through midwicket, then cut him for a brace -- all the more remarkable because while Boland was causing mayhem at one end, Cummins was making up for Starc's off day with a controlled spell that, before Pant messed with him, had gone 6-3-11-0.
In the ongoing sequence of Shubman Gill throwing his wicket away, the number three charged at Beau Webster, brought into the attack to provide rest to Boland. The ball was too short for the charge, it seamed in off the deck, flicked the inner edge of Gill’s flailing bat, and Carey held a sharp chance diving to his left. (Gill 13 off 15; India 78/4), and with that, all specialist batsmen back in the hut.
Webster added a first Test wicket to his debut 50 -- this one came gift-wrapped with a bow on it. Moral of the story -- Pant, who greeted Boland in the very next over, from the opposite end, with a waltz down the wicket to slam the ball to the straight boundary, is a model to admire, but not to emulate.
Just to underline the point, in Webster's next over Pant almost casually despatched him through point. The next ball produced a falling-over scoop, not fully controlled but four anyway; and then came down the wicket again to the next ball and smashed it over extra cover.
To round off an amazing over, Webster found Pant's outside edge with his last ball; Carey, who was standing up to keep Pant in his crease, couldn't hold on. At the end of it all, Pant was 34 for 18 and India's lead had just gone past the 100 mark.
Webster's next over: Ball one, Pant goes down on one knee and slogs the sweep high over the deep backward square boundary for six. Ball three, again slogged, this time along the ground, in the same direction for four.
By now, his innings had the field of an emphatic '&^%$ off' to the 'honest words' spoken by his coach in the dressing room, to the commentators who banged on endlessly about his 'irresponsibility', and to the world at large that things edging into the slip cordon is preferable to occasionally getting out in pursuit of runs.
Pant's 50 came with an effortless flick off the pads off Starc, brought back to replace Webster. The next ball was swung, over square leg, for a second successive six.
Pant's 50 came off 29 balls, with five fours and three sixes; India was 118/4 at the time and Pant, for the second successive innings, had single-handedly outscored the top four.
In an anti-climax, Cummins came back for another spell; the first ball was angled across, climbing and seaming away to beat Pant's attempt to smite over point. Carey took the edge and Pant was gone for 61 off 33 balls with six fours and four sixes, having scored almost half of India's 124/5 at that point.
The partnership produced 46 runs off 42 balls; Jadeja's contribution was 2 off 19; he had earlier contributed 17 of the 19 runs in partnership with Shubman Gill.
Nitish Reddy came out and tried to dig deep. Boland took him out cheap, for the second time in the game -- this time, with a fuller length delivery that Reddy tried to drive over mid on. It's a shot he had played with ease and fluency earlier in this series; here, the mental pressure more than technical deficiency caused him to check his shot, holing out to Cummins at mid off. (4 off 21, India 129/6.)
One of the major reasons for that wicket was the nature of the post-Pant batting. Jadeja was stuck at his end -- he had, at the time of Reddy's dismissal, gone 24 deliveries without scoring a run; the partnership lasted 31 deliveries for just five runs.
That kind of batting allowed the Aussies, reeling under the Pant onslaught, to get a second wind; the bowlers got back to their preferred lengths and lines and the field came back in where previously, they had been scattered along the boundary.
Not everyone can be a Rishabh Pant -- but the least you can do, particularly if you are in the side to 'strengthen the batting', and occupy the number six slot -- is to keep the board ticking over.
On a day of excellent slip catching, Smith at second slip blotted the copybook almost on the stroke of stumps when he went across Usman Khawaja at first -- the Jadeja edge, drawn by Webster, was headed straight for Khawaja when Smith intervened and spilt a simple chance.
India closed out the day on 141/6, leading by 145 with four wickets in hand, leaving the match in a delicate balance, with neither side clearly having the upper hand.
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