The charts above provide the batting and bowling averages by batting and bowling position for the 2025-26 Ashes. On the face of it, the superiority of the Australian bowling shines through, even without Josh Hazlewood (for all five Tests), Pat Cummins (for four out of five Tests) and Nathan Lyon (for three out of five Tests). Mitchel Starc and Scott Boland were masterful for Australia. Michael Neser and Pat Cummins (when he played) provided admirable support. And it was enough. England’s bowlers struggled to stay fit - a predicament made worse by the fact that England did not compensate for their bowling deficit by playing the extra bowler. Stokes broke down with injuries in two of the Test and did not bowl for large periods of the Australian second innings in Adelaide, and not at all in the Australian second innings in Sydney.

The figures for each bowling position suggest that England’s spare bowlers (bowlers in positions 5 or later) outdid Australia’s. They did, thanks to Stokes’ five wicket haul (as the 5th bowler) in the first innings of the series. After that, England’s fifth bowlers managed six wickets in four Tests. As the figures also show, England four main bowlers needed more support than Australia’s four main bowlers did. But England’s fifth bowler bowled roughly the same number of overs as Australia’s fifth bowlers.

This could have been a more competitive series than it turned out to be, especially once it became evident that the Australian attack was depleted. But England’s decision to replace the injured Mark Wood with the part-time off-spin of Will Jacks effectively ended England’s chances. It increased the stress on England’s attack, extended the run output of the Australian tail, stretched Ben Stokes’ bowling health to breaking point, and made it impossible to England to take any advantage of Australia’s injury problems. Michael Neser and Scott Boland would play many more Tests than they actually have in this era if they weren’t competing with four all time great Australian bowlers. Winning in Australia is always difficult. It becomes more difficult, as India found out last year and England have found this year, when teams don’t play enough bowling because they think they need more batting. Unless the opposition also makes the same choice (as England did against India in England in 2025), this hedge does not work.

While watching the first day of the fourth Ashes Test at the MCG today, it struck me just how many fast bowlers were bowling today. England had four - Brydon Carse, Gus Atkinson, Josh Tongue and Ben Stokes. Australia fielded five - Michael Neser, Scott Boland, Jhye Richardson, Mitchell Starc and Cameron Green. All nine bowlers on show could bowl (at least) at speeds in the early to mid-eighties.

Since twenty wickets fell on the first day for 266 runs, there was plenty of nostalgia about how batters back in the day had better concentration (its always something mental isn’t it - something nobody can ever test, and can consequently be said with impunity) than players today. It is evidently a view shared by ex-players too, highly regarded coaches among them (though, to be fair, Jason Gillespie’s overall view of things is probably far more considered than that tweet suggests).

The wicket at the MCG had a lot of grass. The Australian captain described the pitch as “quite furry, quite green”, and promptly selected a five man pace attack. When it was announced after Australia’s win at Adelaide that Pat Cummins would be unavailable, I felt that Australia would provide a green top at the MCG. There are 12 WTC points at stake. Australia went one better and ignored the spinner altogether on the predictably green pitch.

While watching the innings today, I kept waiting for the relief against the change bowler for the batting side at 40/4. It never came. Even the West Indies in the days of Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards would bowl Richards or Roger Harper or Larry Gomes or Carl Hooper (later in the 90s) or Jimmy Adams from time to time, even if it was for just three or four overs to give the fast men a breather. In the 20th century, Ben Stokes and Harry Brook, could expect to play an over or two of spin at some point. In todays Test match, they had no such prospect. They knew that it was going to be one fast bowler after another hitting a length and getting unpredictable seam movement. Playing as Brook did (or as Rishabh Pant did in similar conditions in Sydney in early 2025) was not as high risk a play as it must appear to eyes schooled in the staider world of 20th century Australian Test cricket.

I looked up the amount of fast bowling Australia fielded in Tests in the 20th century. As a standard, I define a fast bowler as a bowler who (a) is classed as medium-fast, fast-medium, fast or medium by ESPNCricinfo, and (b) bowls at least 7% of Australia’s overs in Test cricket). The table below lists all Australian home Tests in which at least four players who satisfied these two conditions bowled for the home team.

Readers will notice that this threshold includes decided part-timers like Steve Waugh (249 wickets in 356 FC matches) and Tom Moody (361 wickets in 300 FC matches). But even so, there is one Test match between 1968 and 1983 when Australia fielded four or five fast bowlers in Test. As as aside, this is perhaps why Dennis Lillee took so many wickets, bowled so many overs, and missed so many Tests for Australia due to injuries. Lillee missed 47 of the 117 Tests Australia played between his debut and his last Test. For much of the 1970s, they used Greg Chappell (291 wickets in 321 FC matches) as their change bowler.

In the 2000s, Australia used Andrew Symonds and Colin Miller (Greg Blewett averaged only 31 balls per Test in his 46 Tests), until Shane Watson, Mitchell Marsh and then Cameron Green and Beau Webster have come along. The bowler who would merely put the ball on a length has gone from Australian fast bowling. They’re prepared to use Travis Head (or Michael Clarke before him) on the finger spin side. But Marnus Labuschagne (91 FC wickets in 173 FC matches) is only used mostly when things are desperate or hopeless.

England played four fast bowlers in this Test match, and they look a bowler light compared to Australia. This is mostly because of the potential effect of Will Jacks bowling five overs for thirty at some point tomorrow in this low scoring match.

For the most part this extra efficiency in modern Test teams is because of the increased run expectation from wicket keepers. Rodney Marsh, with his 26.5 Test average would probably not be considered for the Australian or English Test team of the twenty first century. Nor would Jack Russell or Bruce French or Ian Healy or Bob Taylor or Wally Grout. More runs from the keeper, means room for one more bowler. More bowling depth means less respite for the opposition batters.

On this MCG pitch thirty or forty years ago, the second change bowler would probably be Steve Waugh or a spinner. Ben Stokes and Harry Brook could afford to wait for that. Against today’s Australia, they can’t.

Then there’s the matter of the wobble seam, and the fact, as Steve Smith observed last year “Since 2021 when they changed the Kookaburra ball, batting has definitely got more difficult, particularly at the same time wickets got greener as well.”

There’s little evidence to suggest that today’s players can’t concentrate for long periods of time or that they’re technically weaker than their predecessors from a generation or two ago. But nostalgia is self-fulfilling. It does not concern itself with little things like demonstrable evidence or scrutiny of any record.

Cricket develops in interesting ways. If only we’re prepared to look…

1. Instances of Australia playing five fast bowlers in a Test in Australia - there are two such Tests from 1948 to 2000.

2. Fast bowlers playing for Australia in Tests in Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries.

3. Since 2001:

In so many ways, the 2025/26 Ashes were to the 2021/22 Ashes what the 2023/24 England tour of India was to the 2020/21 England tour of India - promised more, and ended up being worse. England have been negative in the 2025/26 Ashes. This is not a charge which could be laid at their door in the 2021/22 series.

In 2021/22, the current Australian quick bowlers were four years younger, and England were basically just outgunned. These two series wins have come without Josh Hazlewood who played in only one of the eight Tests. Hazlewood has collected 168 Test wickets in Australia at 22.7 each, and averages just over four wickets per match there. But at least England tried to compete in 2021/22. They always played four specialist bowlers plus Ben Stokes (who was also four years younger) on that tour.

Four years later, they started out that way at Perth. Gus Atkinson, Jofra Archer, Brydon Carse, Mark Wood and Ben Stokes featured in England’s XI and bowled Australia out for 132. But the Australian attack in Australia is formidable in terms of both quality and depth. Australia’s reserve fast bowlers are not playing Test cricket for Australia because Josh Hazlewood, Pat Cummins and Mitchell Starc - three all time great fast bowlers - are. In another era, Scott Boland would probably play a lot more than his 17 Tests by age 37. What’s more, Australia never make the mistake of playing fewer than four specialist wicket takers.

After that first Test at Perth, England took the same wrong lesson which they did from their 2021/22 tour of Australia - that their problem was with their batting. It wasn’t. It was just that their bowling was not as good as Australia’s. In the 2025/26 series after Perth England chose to play negatively, replacing the injured Mark Wood with the off-spinning all rounder Will Jacks. Jacks is a part-time off-spinner who averages 70 balls (or 11.4 overs) per match in first class cricket. In the 2nd and 3rd Test, Jacks conceded 4/246 in 50.3 overs.

The problem was not that Jacks conceded nearly 250 runs in 2 Tests (including 212 at the Adelaide Oval), it was that he did this by design, as one of England five main bowlers (of which the injury prone Ben Stokes was another). This deficit has the added effect of forcing the three frontline bowlers to bowl at times when they would otherwise not have to bowl.

Much of the focus after England’s defeat remains on England’s batting. This is due to a basic misunderstanding about the nature of the Test match contest. The Australian bowlers don’t miss their lines and length as much as England’s. England’s strategy of going with genuine pace is still workable. Even if Brydon Carse has been expensive, he has still collected a wicket every 35 balls (for 29 runs apiece). England have the bowling to threaten Australia and compete with Australia. It’s just that they have chosen to not play it.

But this is hardly news. England did the same thing in India in 2023-24. They brought only four spinners on a tour on which their head coach expected to play (going by a press interview he gave) three or even four if necessary in the eleven. When two of those four were injured, they didn’t replace them with anyone.

With Nathan Lyon, Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins missing from the Boxing Day Test, England’s method of hedging with Will Jacks at number eight as the lone spinner in a five man attack (of which Ben Stokes is one bowler) has a better chance of working. But this is only because the quality of the Australian bowling will have dropped, and because they will probably need a spinner a lot more at the MCG than they did at Perth.

The strange thing about this series is that to anyone who has watched England and Australia and every other team in Test cricket in the last seven years or so, this result comes as no surprise. This is a great Australian team. But in England it is continually underrated. This was the case before the 2023 Ashes in England, and it is the case today. Stuart Broad called it the weakest Australian team since 2010. Bazball is as much a personality cult, as it is an approach to risk taking with the bat in Test cricket. England’s bazballers have lost in India and Pakistan and won in New Zealand on their recent away tours since the previous Ashes.

The Ashes to Ashes cycle is, it appears, what matters to English cricket fans and certainly to the English cricket press. But even here, England’s record read 2 series wins and 4 defeats on six tours in the three away seasons leading up to the Bazball era. In the three seasons of the Bazball era so far, it reads 2 wins, 3 defeats and 1 draw.

For the most part, this is because Bazball has had little to say about bowling and little interest in it. Apart from the fact that England responded to falling 1-0 behind at Perth by weakening (and reducing) their bowling, it was telling that on the 3rd day at Perth, after England trimmed the first innings deficit to 85 runs, Jofra Archer bowled only 10 of England’s 66 overs in the 3rd innings. Ben Stokes bowled none. England bowled 27 overs of part time off-spin. Will Jacks and Joe Root were so poor, that three Australian left handers collected 1/129 in 151 balls against them on that afternoon. Contrast that with Mitchell Starc (he will be 36 years old in a month) who made 77(141) to stretch Australia’s first innings to 511 in Brisbane, and then bowled 11 of Australia’s 34 overs in the remainder of that day.

Test matches are not decided by individual deliveries. The English batting has not been irresponsible or poor. They have come up against a attack of great quality, class and depth. Their approach of taking chances, and being less selective than Test batters traditionally are about attacking shots, is reasonable. Trying to loft a four over the infield, or reverse-sweeping the off-spinner against the break, doesn’t become a riskier option just because there have already been two fours in the over. If anything, it is arguably riskier if a player who doesn’t normally loft over the infield or play the reverse-sweep tries it uncharacteristically.

Test matches are invariably won by the stronger, deeper bowling attack. That’s what has happened in the 2025/26 Ashes. It has required less effort from Australia in 2025/26 than it did in 2021/22. Australia scored 37.2 runs per wicket in the 2025/26 Ashes, to 36.3 runs per wicket in the first three Tests of the 2021/22 series. They’ve collected a wicket every 40.9 balls in 2025/26, to one every 44.3 balls in 2021/22. Their wickets have cost them 7 runs more (18.7 to 25.8 runs per wicket), but in exchange for getting their wickets 9% faster, that’s a deal any team will gladly take.

Australia have won the Ashes because they’re currently in an all time great era. England have lost the Ashes for the same reason. They’ve made things worse for themselves (much as India did by picking the extra batter at number eight in Australia in 2024/25) by making a fatally negative choice by picking Will Jacks at number eight. It says much about the coverage of the Ashes in the English press that amidst all the usual psychobabble, the various English coaches and players who have appeared before the press have not been asked about this negative choice.

Australia won’t mind it one bit.

Basically, Marco Jansen got 12 wickets in 69 false shots and Simon Harmer got 17 in 92 - a convenrsion rate neither bowler has achieved in his career before this series (and is not likely to again). For IND, the 5 regular mainstays of the IND batting after the Kohli-Pujara-Rahane-Rohit era - Yashasvi Jaiswal, KL Rahul, Shubman Gill, Rishabh Pant and Ravindra Jadeja - scored 2 fifties between them in 18 innings in the series. They survived 7 false shots per dismissal and made 309 runs at 18.2 runs per dismissal in the series. In England a few months ago, the same five batters averaged 65.7 runs per dismissal and made 2692 runs in the Test series. In England, they survived 15 false shots per dismissal. Against South Africa these batters played a false shot every 5.4 balls, to one every 7.1 balls in England.

Finally, the two Indian captains both lost the toss.

Put these three facts together, and its not difficult to see why South Africa won a close first Test in which India played 10 v 11, and a one-sided second Test in which South Africa won the toss and ran away with the match. Test matches are almost always decided because things go wrong for one team more than they do for another. They are not decided because one team makes bad decisions and the opposition doesn’t.

The details of the cricket are interesting (they usually are). For instance, both Harmer and Jansen have extraordinarily high release points. Harmer has a lot more experience than Washington Sundar. Harmer is 36, while Washington Sundar is only 26.

For a longer discussion about those, see this. But when you listen to it, keep in mind that the record presented here only explains why the probabilities nudged towards South Africa. They do not guarantee a 2-0 SA win. That outcome is down to luck.

This advancement is a sign of the times. Nearly two hundred years of vital and relentless intellectual and political activism in our industrial age has driven social change, especially in the world’s democracies and in the erstwhile Second World. This has led to an increasingly prominent role for women in public life, be it politics, the professions, business or sport. Men have been threatened by this advancement. For one thing, it has meant that they face greater competition for their positions in public life. Many men resent this. For another, their conception of women - half the human species - has had to change. What’s more, what they think of women matters less today than it did before. This erosion of male power (the male chauvinists would call it ‘authority’) is resented by many men as well. It is true that many men have wholeheartedly supported and in some cases even championed the struggle against male chauvinism. Such men form at most a significant minority among all men.

The solid majority of men who seem to think that women’s advancement is either much of a muchness, or some kind of affirmative action program designed to prop up the weak and dismantle their meritocracy are on the defensive these days. Most of them watch what they say out of worries about “political correctness” (their term). Political correctness refers to the idea that some things which are true and well-founded can no longer be said because to do so would offend some increasingly powerful people and marginalize oneself. This is of course not true. For the most part, these things are neither true nor well-founded. They’re old prejudices. And this bogie of political correctness is basically a passive-aggressive cudgel raised by defeated men who do not yet acknowledge that their prejudices are, in fact, prejudices.

Consider the flurry of commentary about women’s sport in recent months. John McEnroe took exception to the idea that Serena Williams is the greatest tennis player of all time by suggesting that she would be 700th at best in the men’s rankings. The women’s world cup, and the women’s game more generally have brought about two types of commentary. The first kind is involved in benchmarking the women’s game to the men’s game. The second kind suggests that they’ve always covered the women’s game. Needless to say, both classes of commentary are committed by men.

The first kind of commentary either takes McEnroe’s line, suggesting that women will never be as good as men, or it takes a more technocratic line, asking, as Tim Wigmore did in a recent essay for The Cricket Monthly “How far can women’s cricket go?” (The answer - much closer to men’s cricket than it is today)

For an example of the second kind of commentary, consider this set of events. Boria Majumdar, who is Sachin Tendulkar’s biographer among other things, was recently shown up wonderfully by the former India and Maharashtra cricketer Snehal Pradhan on twitter. In a report for the Economic Times, Majumdar’s first paragraph ended with the sentence “While not many had given them a chance, the eves made the final ending up runners-up to the hosts.” Majumdar was writing about the 2010 Women’s World T20 tournament. India did not reach the final of this tournament.

It might have been considered a simple error of recall and corrected. Instead, in a series of tweets, Majumdar denied that he wrote what the report plainly shows that he wrote (the online version was later revised to correct the factual error) and went on to explain to Pradhan what he really meant to say. Merely admitting the error would have meant that Majumdar did not recall who played the final of a tournament which he claimed to have covered. This would be a remarkable oversight. Less charitably, it would suggest that Majumdar had paid no serious professional attention to the 2010 Women’s World T20, but tried to wing an interest in it given the current public prominence of the ongoing Women’s World Cup. After all, women’s cricket is more fashionable now than it has ever been. Perhaps Heinlein’s razor applies here.

Majumdar’s attitude is revealed perfectly in his aggravating way of referring to the Indian women’s cricket team as the “the eves”. I will stop considering this to be pathetically sexist the day I see a report by an Indian male cricket journalist which refers to Kohli’s team as “the adams”. This obsession with placing everything about women’s cricket (and women’s sport) in reference to the men’s game, be it with honest attempts to compare the women’s game to the men’s game, or patronizing attempts to give importance to the women’s game by making a grand show of olympian male journalists paying attention to a women’s tournament, are both symptoms of the same malaise. This is the malaise which places men at the center of the world.

It is not really about the men. There is no reason to think that men’s cricket is ‘better’ than women’s sport. Men are bigger, heavier and faster than women. But it is not as though men do anything special in their life to become physically stronger than women. The average male couch potato is bigger, heavier and stronger than the average female couch potato. Given how society is organized, bigger, more powerful, bodies simply come up with the rations for men, don’t they? In many parts of the world treating girls on equal terms with boys is still seen as an act of charity towards girls.

It is not surprising that men can fling a cricket ball faster than women. There are studies which compare how the difference between men’s and women’s sporting records has developed over the last 50 years. In sports which depend on physical power, the men are predictably ahead of women by a greater difference. But I’d wager that on a speed per pound of body-weight basis, Florence Griffith-Joyner was probably faster than Ben Johnson in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Comparing the male competition in sport to the female competition in the same sport makes about as much sense as trying to compare Einstein and Darwin as scientists and deciding who was the ‘better’ scientist.

Women’s cricket is not the same as Men’s cricket. But it is equally cricket. Similarly, Women’s tennis is not the same as Men’s tennis, but it is equally tennis. If the two were the same, they would not be two separate sports with their own tournaments and touring schedules. As a comparative fact between two things, equality would be trivial if the two things were the same. It acquires significance precisely because the two things are not the same.

Women’s cricket has to be understood on its own terms. This requires watching it with an open mind and a generous, intellectually sincere imagination. Lazy observation followed by formulaic cliches simply will not do. The sporting contest in women’s cricket is bound to have aspects of significance which are different from those found in men’s cricket. Instead of applying the template of the men’s game to the women’s game, it is necessary to try and understand what women’s cricket is about, on its own terms. The fact that we currently seem to think women’s cricket has some obligation to aspire to the “level” of men’s cricket reveals the poverty of our imagination. It reveals nothing at all about women’s cricket. If we bother to learn about women’s cricket, we might, in turn learn more about ourselves as people. But this won’t happen until we let go of the worldview which makes men the point of reference of everything.

****

Here’s a conversation I recorded in 2020 with Snehal Pradhan and Karunya Keshav about their report on the state of women’s cricket in India. The report is available for purchase here. The journalist, the late Siddhanta Pattnaik was a co-author of their report.

Let’s leave the jingoism to the top TV commentators and the editor of the Wisden Almanack. It is true that Root’s current record (like James Anderson’s) is in large part a function of the unprecedented rate at which England play Test cricket. Anderson, for instance, played 188 Tests in 21 years and 2 months. During this period, England played 268 Tests. He missed 80. Root has played 157 in 12 years and 6 months out of England’s 159 during this period.

But that’s neither here nor there. Root is still a marvellous player to have built that record. I first heard about him in 2011. There was talk of him getting a debut against India in England. He was discussed as a surefire 100 Test cap player, not on twitter, but by a few careful observers who don’t typically offer such prognoses. He was still about 18 months away from his Test debut. There are few players of such obvious quality as teenagers, and fewer still who make good on that obvious quality. Root is one such.

But simply, its a question of bowling depth. Root (like Smith and Virat Kohli and other contemporaries) played in the DRS era. It has been an era of superior bowling depth compared to the 2000s. The table below gives the bowling averages by bowling position for bowlers (other than those who played for the player’s team) in each player’s era. Each player’s era includes all Tests from the player’s debut to the player’s most recent Test.

For example, in Jacques Kallis’s era (14 Dec 1995 to December 26, 2013), excluding South African bowlers, the average opening bowler’s wickets cost 30.4 and 33.2 runs each, while the average change bowler’s wickets cost 33.1 and 34.0 runs each. For Graham Gooch, the corresponding figures are 25.9, 30.2, 31.7 and 36.0.

I’ll leave you to browse the table…

Bowlers by bowling position (except bowlers from the player’s team)

The over-rate rule is published, and free to read. None of these journalists, podcasters or content creators have bothered to read it. I’ve even had conversations with podcasters whose podcasts many of you may listen to, who (a) haven’t read the rule, (b) misread the rule after I share it with them, and then (c) say that the rule is “as clear as mud” when it is explained to them. Others point to sources and link to articles from 2023, even though the playing conditions are updated regularly and the updated versions are published on the ICC’s website. The persistent, wilful ignorance of the existence of these published rules is typically dressed up with good intentions. “We’re just trying to improve the game”.

It just doesn’t wash. People who can’t be bothered to read and seem to be ruled by their partisan preoccupations and resentments are unlikely to want to improve anything. Most of these people don’t realize that they’re being abusive because they’re floating about in a lukewarm secondhand soup of third rate interpretations and nostalgia (“they used to bowl 21 overs an hour in the 1950s!”, “everyone agrees that modern over-rates are outrageous/abysmal/shocking[or some other incendiary term implying malice]!!”). They go through this ritual of rage, abuse and content creation every time there’s even a whiff of an opportunity to discuss over-rates. The one thing they never ever ever do is read the rule. One variant used by the set of culprits listed above is to reluctantly skim the rules when they can no longer be ignored and treat them as an a la carte menu from and point to stray phrases which they insist either support their view or suggest some fatal contradiction in the internal logic of the rules. None of them seem to care enough about cricket to actually study the rules which govern it.

The rules which govern how the over-rate is to be calculated are published in the Test Match Playing Conditions [pdf, p. 31, a screenshot is attached at the end].

Anyway, this persistent ignorance is unlikely to change. Persistent ignorance is certainly not an exclusively English strongpoint either. Just in the Lord’s Test, replace English with Indian in above paragraphs, and replace over-rates with ball-tracking, and you will get a perfectly clear picture of the abuse hurled at Umpire Reiffel by Indian ex-players, journalists, podcasters and content creators. The word abuse is exactly equally apposite in this case as well.

Now, to the publicly available data. This data is exactly equally available to me, you and everyone mentioned above. Apart from the rules, Cricinfo’s scorecard provides the length of each individual innings in minutes (see the column “M” in the spreadsheet). The total playing time for a team innings is the sum of the minutes batted by each player in the innings divided by two (since there are two batters, one at each end). Applying this to the Lord’s Test we get:

1st Innings: 675 legal deliveries in 522 minutes.
2nd: 716, 556
3rd: 373, 277
4th: 449, 365

The over rate calculation includes allowances for each wicket (2 minutes) and each drinks break (4 minutes). Additionally the bowling side also receives allowances, measured in terms of the actual time lost, for onfield injury treatment, DRS reviews, time-wasting by the batting side, and any other time lost for reasons which are beyond the control of the fielding side. If a wicket falls on the last ball before a drinks break or a session break, there is no fixed allowance for such a wicket.

In addition to providing the minutes batted by each batter, the scorecard provided by Cricinfo also gives a summary of scores at each drinks break and each session. So it is possible to calculate at least the fixed allowances for each innings with complete accuracy. For instance, one Day One, there were 4 wickets and 3 drinks breaks - 20 minutes in total. Further, there was one DRS review. Additionally, there may have been deductions for time-wasting, injury treatments etc. In this way, estimating the approximate over-rate is a fairly straightforward calculation (It is little more than a 4th grade arithmetic word problem).

The 1st innings of the Lord’s Test includes 18 minutes for 9 wickets (since the 10th ended the innings) and 12 minutes for three drinks breaks. Deducting 30 minutes from 522, we get 1.37 balls per minute for this innings, or 13.7 overs per hour (675 legal deliveries in at the most 492 minutes). Additionally, there were two reviews, plus injury breaks if any. So the over-rate for the first innings was at least 13.7 over per hour. For example, if one considers that all other deductions for reviews, injuries etc. amounted to 10 minutes in total, then the over rate - 675 balls in 482 minutes, is 14.0 overs per hour.

In India’s 2nd bowling innings in the match (the third of the match), there were 4 DRS reviews, 8 wickets for which the 2 minute allowance counted (England’s second wicket fell the ball before the first drinks break on Day 4), and 2 drinks breaks. That’s 24 minutes of fixed allowances, in addition to the DRS reviews and injury breaks (for Crawley etc.). Considering just the fixed allowances, India’s over-rate for their 2nd bowling innings comes to 14.7 overs per hour. Even if you consider just 6 extra minutes for the 4 DRS reviews, time wasting and injury breaks combined (this is a very very low estimate), this over-rate creeps above 15.0 over per hour for this innings. This is important in this instance.

The over-rate for each team is evaluated for the whole match, and not for a single innings. A team has to achieve the required over-rate over both innings. The rule (see 12.9.4) makes three further allowances. First, if a fielding side bowls the opposition out in 80 overs or less, and “the Minimum Over Rate requirement for that innings has not been exceeded”, then the team’s over-rate for that innings is not included in the over-rate calculation for that team for the match. If the Minimum Over Rate requirement has been exceeded, then it is included in the match over rate calculation for the team.

There are two more allowances (12.9.4.2, and 12.9.4.3) which are self-evident extensions of 12.9.4.1. But 12.9.4.1 is designed to minimize the damage to teams which might have a slow overate because (for example), they bowl more fast bowling and less spin. Without 12.9.4.1, England’s penalty for the Lord’s Test would likely have been harsher than it actually was.

In the Lord’s Test, England’s over-rate in the 4th innings was slower than their over-rate in the 2nd. Given the allowances specified in the rules, it was unlikely to have exceeded the minimum over rate requirement. So England’s match over rate was almost certainly only their over rate for the first innings. For India, their 3rd innings over-rate almost certainly exceeded the minimum over-rate requirement. So it would be included in their match calculation (and was evidently sufficient to overcome their slow over-rate in the first innings).

The publicly available record, when considered properly, shows that the over rate ruling by the referee is reasonable.

Given that it is possible to examine all this merely by spending 20 minutes or so studying the public and free record available with a few taps on your keyboard or phone (and some arithmetic which a 10 year old can do), insinuating that the referee and the umpires by insinuating that you don’t understand how they could have reached the conclusions they did (as so many journalists, podcasters, content creators and ex-players have done in the last couple of days), is abuse. These people have abused the referee and the umpires. They owe them an apology. This is unlikely, so at the very least, these abusers owe cricket fans their silence. This alas, is also unlikely.

Hence this quick calculation and this lament. It is not pleasant to have to point out things like this. The over-rate is one of the most boring pseudo-issues in the game in my view. But as a device for undermining the authority of the umpires and cultivating the partisan resentments of a target audience (as most of these podcasters, content creators, ex-players and ex-captains aspire to do), it is lethal.

But Brook does something else. He premeditates. There are balls which he plays on their merits - on their line and length. And then there are balls on which he picks his spot before the ball is bowled. This is evident in how much he moves even before the ball is bowled. In the case of the two ramps against Akashdeep in the 3rd innings at Lord’s, Brook had moved across his stumps before the ball was released. In the case of three other boundaries - the square-cut, the on-drive and the lofted off-drive, Brook the line and length.

For his dismissal, he premeditated again. But it went wrong. It’s tempting to think that he misjudged the length. But that would be to miss the point. He committed to the shot even before the ball was released. He was going to hit that ball into the leg-side. Among the many options available to him - front-foot-pull, the slog-sweep, the normal sweep, the ramp, the flick, depending on where the ball ended up. Another option would be that he’d miss the ball. That’s what happened.

The point though, is that Brook took the exact same chance on the balls which he ramped for four and the ball which got him out. His action in each case was identical, and it was decided before the ball was released.

Does a player of Brook’s stroke-making ability need to pre-meditate? That’s a question of policy. Bazball gives him the license to pre-meditate (just as India give Rishabh Pant the license to do what he likes). There are benefits to playing like Brook. It forces the fielding side to put fielders where they would rather not. It forces the bowler to worry about whether or not the batter is premeditating. When the batter is premeditating, bowling at the stumps is the usual strategy (that way, if the batter misses, he’s out). But bowling at the stumps is often too straight (and too full) if the batter ends up not pre-meditating.

Whatever it might be, Brook’s approach is not driven by arrogance. Its driven by a estimation of risks which Sangakkara’s generation of accumulators would consider to be imprudent. But this is essentially only basic theory underlying Bazball - that traditional, Test match batters have tended to be inefficient about risks, and that cultivating a broader range of attacking shots and playing them more often will produce not only quicker runs, but more runs. It’s a good theory, judging by the evidence so far, even if, it brings dismissals like Brook or Duckett’s regularly.

That the conditions were easing by the end of the third innings was evident in Australian last wicket stand between Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood. The pair batted for 134 legal deliveries during which they played only 28 false shots. Over the last 20 years (records for control are available for this period), the average last wicket stand has played a false shot every 3.6 balls. For further comparison, the average opening stand has played a false shot every 6.1 balls.

It is difficult to say if the wicket had already eased by the time Australia lost of their ninth wicket. But it is probably worth wondering whether Australia would have been better off declaring when they were about 8 down and 180 in front, and bowling at the South African top order while the last of the juice in the pitch might still have been available. The point is probably not fair to Pat Cummins. But the wicket did ease significantly. Cummins induced 13 false shots in 102 balls in the 4th innings compared to 34/109 in South Africa’s first innings, Hazlewood induced 12/114 (compared to 22/90 in the first innings). Bavuma and Aiden Markram made the most of that window of fine batting conditions before the wicket dried out and the ball began to grip the surface. By the end of the South African run chase, this had begun. Starc’s pearl to dismiss Tristan Stubbs broke the surface. Nathan Lyon’s off breaks did so regularly out of the rough created by the left arm pace of Mitchell Starc and Marco Jansen in the match.

The South African 4th innings involved 76 false shots in 502 legal deliveries - one every 6.6 balls, compared to one every 4.9 balls, 4.5 balls and 4.1 balls in the first three innings of the match. Had Ngidi been on song from the word go, the consequences would have been interesting. It would likely have shortened the Australian first innings, and hastened the beginning of the 4th. This would probably have meant a smaller 4th innings target, but also better conditions for Cummins and co. to bowl in with the new ball.

It is interesting to think about what might have been. But what was, was glorious. Is glorious. South Africa have some magnificent players and now those players have a winners medal. Knockout sport is a lottery - an artifact of capitalism rather than sporting logic. Finals exist because they make for juicy stories. Those stories will be told in the coming days, hopefully in the highest traditions of fiction and not in the more prevalent B-variety of fiction in which every character is constantly damned with faint praise in tediously indirect and unsubtle ways. For cricket fans, there is Kagiso Rabada and there are the marvellous Australian quick bowlers. There’s Steven Smith and Aiden Markram. There’s plenty more. But that’s more than enough for one cricket fan in one Test match.

1. The number of balls remaining in the innings (b)

2. The number of wickets in hand (w)

3. The scoring rate at the start of the delivery (e)

4. The number of balls faced by the batter. (bf)

The balls remaining in the innings and the wickets in hand are the two finite resource in limited overs cricket. The scoring rate at the start of the delivery represents the scoring conditions. The number of balls faced by the batter in the innings at the start of a delivery represent how long the batter has spent in the prevalent scoring conditions. The effect of each of these four factors on the runs per ball in T20 is shown in the four figures below.

To estimate the expected runs (xR) and expected wickets (xW) from a delivery, the combined influence of these four factors has to be measured. Each delivery is represented by (bf, b, w, e). For example, the first ball of the innings would be (0, 120, 10, 0). A batter about to face his eleventh delivery with the score at 2/60 after 8 overs would be (10, 72, 8, 1.25). The standard way to do this is by regression. In the implementation I use for my xR and xW estimates, I used a DNN regression.

Runs Above Average Replacement for each delivery are given by the actual runs scored by the batter (or conceded by the bowler, not the same thing, extras other than leg byes and byes also count against the bowler, while only runs off the bat count for the batter) minus the xR estimated by the model.

Runs Above Average Replacement (raar) for all innings of 70 or more in the 2025 IPL so far are given below. Quicker scoring in lower scoring innings accrues a a larger raar. For example, KL Rahul’s 77(37) in a score of 169/4 in 107 balls has a raar of +26.0 runs, while Shreyas Iyer’s 82(36) in a score of 245/6 in 120 balls has a raar of +23.9. The model expected 58.1 runs to be scored from the 36 balls Iyer faced. It expected 51 runs from the 37 balls KL Rahul faced. Similarly, Krunal Pandya’s 73(47) on April 27th had a raar of +12.4 runs. Yashasvi Jaiswal’s 70(40) in significantly quicker scoring conditions had a raar of +4.8 runs.

A few sample xR and xW values are also given below.

Why are England losing? Much of the discussion about this question focuses on what England have been doing. But perhaps the answer lies in what other teams have learnt to do in the last six years. The table below gives the scoring rates (per 100 balls faced) of the top seven batting positions in ODI cricket for the ten listed teams in matches involving only the 10 listed teams. The top seven batting positions face about 40 out of 50 overs on average.

In the 2015-19 period, the approach embraced by Eoin Morgan meant that England’s top seven were scoring, on average, 19.2 runs more than the next best team in the period (India) over 240 balls. Since then, England have found it difficult to sustain their scoring rate, while other teams have caught up with them. The competitive advantage provided by England’s approach in those early years has vanished.

Part of the reason for the small decline in England’s scoring is that other teams have also stopped trying to use bowlers who contain in favor of bowlers who try to get players out. In the lead up to the 2019 World Cup, England lucked out when they found Jofra Archer. Without Archer, England’s plan had been to used David Willey’s left arm medium-fast seam and swing and powerful tailender’s long handle. It would keep them competitive in high scoring ODIs. Archer gave them wicket taking heft which meant that their runs went further than they might have with an attack led by Willey.

England were unable to build an ODI attack around Archer and Adil Rashid. Archer’s injury problems didn’t help. But England’s problem since 2019 has been that they didn’t have a replacement for Archer or Liam Plunkett (96 wickets in 60 ODIs, more than 1.5 wickets per match). Australia, for instance, have built their attack around Adam Zampa (185 wickets in 110 ODIs) and Mitchel Starc (161 wickets in 86 ODIs since the 2015 World Cup). Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood collect more than 1.5 wickets per ODI. England have Adil Rashid (212 wickets in 144 ODIs), Jofra Archer (54 wickets in 31 ODIs), and Reece Topley (47 wickets in 30 ODIs). None of the others achieve 1.5 wickets per ODI.

Since the 2019 World Cup only Afghanistan, West Indies and Bangladesh have averaged fewer wickets per 50 overs in ODI cricket than England. Since the 2023 World Cup England have taken fewer wickets per 50 overs than any other ODI side. England and Pakistan have conceded 295 runs per 300 balls in this period, more than any other side.1

This inability to take wickets has meant that England’s runs don’t go as far as they used to. Add to this the fact that other teams are scoring quicker runs in general, and the advantage England acquired thanks to Morgan’s innovations after the 2015 World Cup has vanished.

England have been losing more often in recent years because the rest of the world has caught up, and in many cases, found ways to be even more efficient than Morgan’s innovations made England. To return to their cutting edge team of the late 2010s, England will have to find the balance to first match the efficiency of today’s best teams and then, if they can, do even better.

Only Shivam Dube’s bowling role was relevant as the batting innings was over by the time the concussion substitution was requested. The blow which caused the concussion occured on the 5th ball of the 20th over of India’s batting innings.

Harshit Rana, is a fast medium new ball bowler. Shivam Dube is a medium pacer who has 53 first class wickets (at 22 apiece) to his name in 21 first class fixtures, mostly for Mumbai.

The question is whether substituting Rana for Dube excessively advantaged Rana’s team. Its the sort of the lethal question where the temptation to presume (or just outright say) that the Match Referee must have been either bent or incompetent is very great. This presumption has been made liberally, though rarely explicitly, and usually with a wink and a snigger. The social media are awash with the resulting spittle.

I’m going to proceed here by assuming that Javagal Srinath, who has been an ICC Match Referee since 2006 and has officiated 79 Tests, 271 ODIs and 135 T20Is (and 485 ICC run matches in all), is not only highly experienced when it comes to working with the regulations as they are issued and updated, but acts in good faith, and with great competence.

The question is, why might Srinath have approved India’s request to use Harshit Rana as a concussion substitute for Shivam Dube?

At the start of this match, both Dube and Rana conceded 8.9 an over in the T20 matches (T20 and T20I).

Dube did not bowl at all in the 2024 IPL or the 2024 T20 World Cup. But since July 2024, he has bowled regularly, both for India and for Mumbai in the domestic T20 tournament. He has bowled his full quota in four out of five matches in the SMAT tournament in December 2024.

Dube typically bowls in T20 after the powerplay - 52 of his 59 overs in T20 cricket have been delivered after the powerplay. Before this match, Harshit Rana had bowled 20 over his 36 during the powerplay.

I haven’t seen the reporting since the match ended, but I suspect that Srinath agreed to allow India to use Harshit Rana as a concussion substitute for Shivam Dube in the bowling innings provided Rana did not bowl in the first half of the innings. This stipulation would be reasonable since that’s when Dube would have bowled, had he bowled. Rana was first used in the 12th over of England’s chase.

Did Rana provide an advantage over Dube? Probably. But this is permitted in the rules. The question is whether he provided an excessive advantage. The rule is written to prohibit an excessive advantage. The implication is that it is inevitable that in some cases, there will be some advantage gained from the substitute player. Or at least, that it is unlikely to be possible to have like-for-like replacements which are exactly equal to the player they are replacing.

To answer this, consider the following hypothetical: Would Hardik Pandya have provided an excessive advantage over Shivam Dube as a concussion substitute in a bowling innings? Would Mitchell Marsh in a bowling innings?

It is tempting to think that “like-for-like” is a reference to style and not quality. But I suspect that if IND used Shami or Bumrah in place of Dube (both Shami and Bumrah have career T20 economy rates which are much better than Dube’s, in Bumrah’s case, not only is it much better than Dube, but it is also much better than Shami), Srinath would not have permitted it, even with a restriction on when the substitute could be used in the innings. “Like-for-like” is also not strictly about style. England have used Matt Parkinson (a leg spinner) as a concussion substitute for Jack Leach (an orthodox finger spinner). India have similarly used Yuzvendra Chahal for Ravindra Jadeja. Both were permitted.

Allowing Harshit Rana to replace Shivam Dube is, on balance, not unreasonable. India obviously wanted the best replacement they could get. The rule allows the replacement to provide some advantage, just not excessive advantage. Replacing a medium pacer with a medium-fast bowler on debut for a bowling innings when both have nearly identical T20 career economy rates so far, is not excessive is it? It is squarely within the rule. The rule is written to protect the player who has suffered a blow to the head and is considered to be at risk for concussion (note that the rule specifies “a concussion or suspected concussion”) without turning it into a 10 v 11 match. The referee is given discretion to bring about this outcome. Any reasonable evaluation of the Referee’s decision should not lose sight of the fact that the referee has discretion within the restrictions specified above (the full rule is attached at the end of this post).

Rana got 3 wickets on the day. That’s part of the reason for the controversy. If he had collected 0/35 and England had won in 19 overs, then perhaps it would not have mattered. But that cannot be the Match Referee’s problem.

Sadly in situations like this, appearances usually matter more than the details. The details are usually more interesting. They usually show, rather inconveniently, that the people charged with making decisions are not idiots.

3-1 is a fair reflection of the difference between the sides. Australia have a great attack for these conditions. Scott Boland in Australia is what Axar Patel is in India - a specialist for the conditions. It is a pity that the gap between the Indian and Australian attacks in this series widened because India appear to have returned to the bad old days of the futile pursuit respectability instead of competitiveness.

Their argument, presumably, is that the extra batter shores up their out of form batting line up. They’re essentially saying that playing one extra batter and one less bowler improves their eleven even though there are fewer bowlers than batters in the eleven to start with. In terms of simple arithmetic, this is a losing proposition. One bowler makes up a larger share to bowling than one batter does of the batting. The extra runs conceded due to the scarcity of threatening bowling increase the difficulty for the batters, because those extra runs mean that the Australians can attack with extra catching fielders for more overs. They don’t reduce it. If the Australians are regularly reducing India to 100/5, then the solution cannot be to add an extra batter at seven while shrinking India’s ability reduce Australia to 100/5 equally regularly.

Very simple, suppose that playing 3 quicks on these pitches means conceding C1 runs, and playing 4 quicks means conceding C2 runs. In exchange, the extra batter produces R runs.

C1-C2 > R, because reducing 4 to 3 (or 5 to 4) is a bigger reduction than increasing 5 to 6 or (6 to 7).

That’s before you consider the basic fact that fast bowling is extremely demanding physically. Requiring 3 fast bowlers to do the work of 4 tires the three out and reduces their effectiveness. The same is not true for the extra batter.

Might it not help some of these batters if the Australian bowlers didn’t have so many runs to play with all the time? If they were forced to place a deep point instead of a third slip, and a deep square leg instead of a leg gully?

The wisdom about this series will be, as Harsha Bhogle puts it here, that “India’s batters just didn’t score enough runs to challenge Australia”. This is an old misunderstanding. It confuses respectability and appearances over actual competitiveness. It is, sadly, unlikely to cease being the conventional wisdom any time soon.

It is unlikely to ever be clear whether the view that four tailenders represented a significantly greater risk than three originated with the head coach, or with the players. The origin doesn’t matter one way or the other. To win, a team needs 20 wickets. And so an eleven designed to compete optimally must have a clear idea of how its going to get 20 wickets. This means playing enough bowling to threaten in as many of the 80 overs of the life of one Test match ball as possible for the given pitch and weather. It is a pity that India did not do this in Australia in 2024-25.

Australia were the better side. This is an all time great Australian side. It is arguably Australia’s greatest ever Test team, given its results in this extremely competitive era. They may well have won anyway even if India had played four quicks. But it would have been more difficult. They would not have scored 337, 474 and 405 in three first innings in seaming conditions. It would also have made it less likely that India would have ended the series with both Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj (52 wickets in the series between them) on the physio’s table.

This was a great series with some thunderous, high quality cricket. It would have been greater still, had India been prepared to attack adequately.

India conceded 474 bowling first. Of the 205 teams which have conceded between 450 and 500 bowling first in Test cricket, 113 have lost, 83 have drawn, and only 8 have won. Of the 44 times this has happened in Australia, the team bowling first has lost 29 and won once. Before Pat Cummins ran in for his first delivery of the Test match, the history book suggested that AUS’s chances of losing this Test match were somewhere between 2% and 4%.

The MCG pitch was better for batting than the first three Test pitches in this series. It was not as quick or bouncy as Perth or Brisbane. And the red ball does less than the pink ball does under lights. But it was not a road. There was still some grass on the pitch. The ball still seamed. There were phases of the innings, when the ball got old, when batting was easier, even though, as Akash Deep, Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj showed, the ball still did a bit even when it was 50 overs old. The new ball was still a threat. Later in the match, the wear and tear of four days of cricket told and there was uneven bounce and a little bit more turn albeit inconsistently.

On paper, India had six bowlers to pick from. But India’s three fast bowlers bowled 147 of India’s 205 overs in the match. That they had to bowl so many overs even though India played 2 spinners suggests that India didn’t play enough fast bowling. One way to think about this is that the Indian eleven was composed in the hope that India would bowl fourth. Given the composition of India’s eleven, Pat Cummins won a very good toss. The second order effects of not having a fourth fast bowler were severe for India in this Test.

It is true that Mohammed Siraj and Akash Deep are not as good as Mitchell Starc and Scott Boland (Boland has 118 first class wickets at 24 at the MCG). This is a reason to give them the support of a fourth fast bowler. The conditions offer nothing to the spinners anyway. So a fast bowler, especially one who is good enough to be selected in the Indian Test squad in 2024, is likely to offer a more sustained threat than even the greatest finger spinner in history. But, such a fast bowler will also lengthen the tail. Washington Sundar’s 200 odd balls of batting and 19 non-threatening overs are considered a more respectable alternative. Even though, those non-threatening overs were a large part of the reason for India conceding 474 and not 320 in the first innings of the match. Sundar, Reddy and Jadeja induced only 27 false shots in 45 overs of bowling in India’s first innings on a pitch on which the three Indian quicks induced 130 in their 77 overs. Australia essentially got 45 free overs to score from in that first innings. They collected 148 runs. What’s more, they forced India’s three quicks to bowl spells more frequently, and also forced the Indian captain to defend runs a lot more than he would have liked.

It was a similar story in the third innings. Despite Jaspit Bumrah, India were just too far behind in the game to be able to attack as much as they would have liked to. They had to defend boundaries and in the process, had to concede singles. It didn’t help that all catches didn’t stick. It also didn’t help that Akash Deep and Siraj were unusually luckless.

India did about as well as they could have hoped to given the side they picked. The team with the better attack won as it typically does. What India have to decide though, is how they want to compete. This question appeared to be settled in recent years. Indian elevens were invariably picked to take 20 wickets in the prevalent conditions (whether it meant picking four fast bowlers, or three spinners) first, with the batting coming from whatever places were left. This reduces the burden on their batters (the scoring will be lower than the batters will have fewer runs to score), and their bowlers (since there’s enough bowling to start with).

Under Gautam Gambhir, it appears that this strategic clarity has been set aside. India are no longer picking four bowlers (regardless of how well they bat) whose basic role is to take wickets. They hesitate to pick more than three such bowlers, because India seem to want to shore up the batting. This does beg the following question though - if the batting requires extra assistance because it may be inexperienced or out of form, doesn’t the bowling require extra assistance because it is inexperienced too? Especially since, wickets actually win matches and reduce the number of runs the team concedes.

But when they have not been available, India have, in the recent past, been prepared to play four tailenders. A tailender is a player picked primarily to take wickets. Whether or not such a player is picked depends on whether they are picking wickets.

Hardik Pandya and Nitish Kumar Reddy are both all-rounders. Shardul Thakur is not. He was picked for his bowling and left out in favor of Prasidh Krishna when his bowling fell away.

India played 4 quicks in 14 Tests outside Asia in the 2018-22 period. They won 6 and lost 7 of these 14 Tests.

India played 3 quicks in 18 Tests outside Asia in the 2018-22 period (excl. Tests in West Indies, for a like-for-like comparison with the above). They won 5 and lost 10 of these 18 Tests.

Being prepared to play four tailenders outside Asia (or more precisely, in South Africa, England, New Zealand or Australia), has brought India better results. Playing the 4th bowler, at least in part for batting, has worked less well.

Is Jadeja really as good as a top order batter for India? Consider the following.

In Tests since 2000, the batting averages by batting position in result Tests and drawn Tests are given below. Tests tend to draws because wickets are difficult to come by. And this usually means that the conditions offer little assistance to the bowler with the new ball and with the old ball. The pitches are flat. And the batters fill their boots.

India’s current top order batters do this regularly. Kohli averages 72 in draws. KL Rahul 53. Every great Test batter you can think of made a lot of runs in draws. The difference is that Tendulkar played 72 draws in 200 Tests (36% draws). Brisbane was KL Rahul’s 9th draw in his 56th Test (16%), and Kohli’s 22nd draw in his 121st Test (18%). In the World Test Championship era (starting in August 2019 for India), Brisbane was KL Rahul’s 2nd draw in 22 Tests, and Kohli’s 4th draw in 44 Tests.

The conditions when facing the new ball are much harder in result Tests than they are in drawn Tests. The expected averages lie in the middle column of the table above, and not in the column on the right.

Ravindra Jadeja has batted 114 times in Test cricket as of December 19, 2024. Of these, he has started his innings in the first 20 overs of the innings only 4 times. In the 33 innings when he has started within the first 40 overs of the innings, he averages 22.1. In the 40 innings when he has started between overs 41-80, he averages 42. In Tests in the WTC era, these figures tick up to 26.9 (22 innings) and 49.5 (32 innings). Over his career, Kohli averages 43.5 when starts his innings in the first 40 overs of the innings, and 69.0 when he starts his innings after the 40th over. In the WTC era, these figures change to 29.0 and 101.4.

Top order runs, especially in the first innings usually suggest that a draw is likely. Of the 249 Test matches which have begun with a century opening stand in the first innings, 100 have been drawn. Of the 754 Test matches which have had a century opening stand for either the first, second or third wicket in the first innings, 297 (or ~40%) end in a draw.

Taking these figures, together with the vanishing draw in the WTC era and the table of averages by batting position above, its clear that Kohli is a much better bat than Jadeja. Batting in the top order on result pitches is difficult. Batters in the top order bat there because they are better than batters in the three, four or five wickets down positions.

All this begs the question. On result pitches, should teams look for specialist top order batters whose instructions are to see off the new ball to the exclusion of everything else? Pujara, rather than Gill. Aiming for 40(150) rather than 70(120)? Usman Khawaja, Nathan McSweeney and KL Rahul have demonstrated the virtues of the former approach. Is it worth using the top order to get Rishabh Pant or Travis Head to the crease after the 30th over? Gill and Jaiswal don’t play this way. But KL Rahul does. He has batted 470 balls in the first three Tests so far.

Interestingly, Australia have decided to replace McSweeney with the 19 year old Sam Konstas for the fourth Test. In his short first class career so far, Konstas scores at 52 runs per 100 balls faced. In contrast, McSweeney scores at 42 runs per 100 balls faced. Australia appear to have chosen a more expansive strokemaker to replace McSweeney. Though, given Konstas’s age and relative first class inexperience - if he makes his debut in the Melbourne Test, it will be only his 12th first class match - his selection may be one of those where the selectors think the player has just too much promise to be kept out. David Warner’s debut Test was his 19th first class match.

India are unlikely to move Jaiswal, Gill or Kohli out of their positions for the rest of this series. They will hope that KL Rahul’s luck continues to hold. On result pitches, top order batters need it, especially when the fast bowling is as good as Australia’s.

Ashwin is India’s greatest Test match winner to date. Of the 39 bowlers who have at least 300 Test wickets to their name, only three bowlers before him - Muralitharan, Hadlee and Lillee - managed at least five wicket per Test. It takes 20 wickets to win a Test, and Ashwin collected 5 per match on average. He also made 3503 Test runs to go with his 500 wickets. Only Stuart Broad has completed the 3500 runs, 500 wickets double in Test cricket before Ashwin. It took Broad 157 Tests to do it. Ashwin did it in his 106th. Measured another way, of the 3204 cricketers who have earned a Test cap, Ashwin is the only one to have more than 500 Test wickets and 5 Test hundreds.

I have written about Ashwin before in these pages [2024, 2020]. He was arguably the most creative bowler of his generation - the Shane Warne of his generation if you will. His variety was a consequence of his relentless inquiry into batters, batting and bowling. His success was down to his iron discipline and competitiveness. His undercutter was the most successful variation in Test cricket in living memory. It formed the cornerstone of his success against left handers in Test cricket. It was delivered with the seam orthogonal to the direction of the ball. This allowed Ashwin to impart revs on the ball and prevent the ball from dipping on the batter. It was the finger spinner’s version of the wrist spinner’s flipper (Shane Warne’s masterful version in the 1990s was similarly lethal).

Beyond his record, Ashwin demonstrated the essential characteristic of a great genius - he was an original. Nothing he did was derivative or an imitation of something others could do. It was, always, an original solution to the problem which confronted him. He was prepared to bowl in the classical fashion, outside the right hander’s off stump. He was also prepared to bowl straighter when the conditions demanded it. At other times, he would bowl from round the wicket to the right hander. He was a master of each of these lines of attack. In his final Test, he bowled a brilliant 17 over spell in conditions which offered nothing for the finger spinner (his great contemporary Nathan Lyon bowled 1 over in the whole match). His returns were not spectacular - 1/53. But he tested, and troubled, ever batter he bowled to and induced errors from all of them.

Ashwin will be difficult to replace in the Indian Test eleven. But he will, hopefully, find a public place in cricket in the years to come. He has already developed an original voice on his Youtube station. His recent memoir, co-authored with Sidharth Monga, ends on the eve of his international debut. A second part of the memoir covering his international career is now required. There is also a severe shortage of the bowler’s voice in the Test match commentary box. Ashwin would be a fine addition there. These are, however, selfish wishes on my part. Ashwin is far more likely to become a coach or a team director in the future, both in the international and league arena. Whatever he does will be rewarding for cricket fans.

Length: 5.5m

Line: -0.33m (33cms to the off side of middle stump - somewhere on the 4th-5th stump line)

Release: -0.66m (66cms to the off side of the middle stump at the bowling crease)

Seam movement: -1.17 deg.

Swing: -0.56 deg.

It was the third innings ending jaffa he received in three innings since he came to Australia.

My database has 577 deliveries from right arm seam bowlers to right handed batters (batting in the top six batting positions in a Test match) on a 5-6m length, pitching 30-40cms to the off side of the middle stump, and seaming at least 1.0 deg. These deliveries produce 36/197. This is not a typo. Specialist bats are dismissed once every 16 balls to such deliveries, and average 5.5 runs per dismissal.

There’s nothing much any batter could have done against that ball. It was, for all intents and purposes, unplayable. The batter has to be lucky to survive it.

But perhaps this is only part of the story. The scorecard at the end of the days looks something like this. It tells an old story. One of a scarcity of bowling thanks to an attempt to sneak in a little bit of batting among the bowlers. Nitish Kumar Reddy and Ravindra Jadeja, for different reasons, offered very little thrIeat with the ball. In Jadeja’s case, a Day Two (effective Day One, these are still the first 100 overs of the match) Brisbane pitch offered no assistence. It is not a surprise that he wasn’t brought on until the 49th over. This was because there was nothing in the first innings pitch for him, and there was plenty in the first innings pitch for the quick bowlers. In Reddy’s case, there was insufficient pace and control. In every over, Reddy delivered either a half volley or a long hop, and in several overs, both. The two combined for 1/141 in 29 overs. They barely beat the bat.

The second order effects of this scarcity of bowling due to the weakness in the 4th and 5th bowler make matters significantly worse. The first of these second order effects is that it forces the fielding captain to bowl the spearheads when he would rather not bowl them. The second of these is that it leaves the fielding captain with absolutely no leeway for contingencies. When Mohammed Siraj went off the field with injury after two balls of the 37th over, the Indian attack looked significantly bare. There were 43 more overs before the second new ball. And Jasprit Bumrah and Akash Deep had already bowled 20 overs between them. The bowling cupboard looked hopelessly bare. The third effect is that unsuitable bowling options force the fielding side to defend runs. This means having fewer catching fielders. This in turn means that an edge is less likely to go to hand.

Siraj returned to field, and even though he was obviously not entirely fit, bowled a lot of overs. To his great credit Siraj also bowled a lot of graveyard overs with the old, soft ball. He bowled 8 overs from 56-80, and spared his younger, less experienced colleague the inevitable mauling from Travis Head and Steven Smith. Akash Deep did not bowl after the 54th over until the new ball arrived. On most other days, he would probably have better returns for inducing 45 false shots in 24 overs of bowling. But not today.

It is difficult to avoid the feeling that having played two out of their five bowlers for their batting, India have conceded about 150 more they ought to have in the first innings. India won the toss and chose to field. India seem to have decided that if they are to win this Test match in these conditions, it would have to be a heist. Win the toss, bowl first, get a lot of wickets with the first new ball, and get ahead in the Test match.

The individual batters control percentages show that India induced 140 false shots in 101 overs, or one every 4.4 balls. Judging by these figures, these are not conditions where 450 is a par score. India have been negative with their selection in this Test match. This type of selection only works when the opposition is also equally negative with their selection. Australia have three great fast bowlers in their ranks. Mitchell Marsh, for all his apparent lack of seriousness, is playing his 120th first class match and has 171 first class wickets to his name, bowling in Australia for the most part. He’s a much better, more experienced fast bowler compared to Nitish Kumar Reddy. What’s more, Nathan Lyon will have the opportunity to bowl fourth. Australia are not negative.

It is a rare Test match when I find myself disagreeing with a selection decision. Even in this match, I can understand the temptation of picking such a negative squad. With rain forecast, it is not the worst idea to try and prolong the Test as much as possible. With the series tied and Melbourne and especially Sydney yet to come, I can see the wisdom in playing for time. Its just that its negative and risky. Besides, its difficult to see where Prasidh Krishna is going to play Test match for India if not in Brisbane, Perth or with the pink ball - Tests made for fast bowlers in conditions where the spinners have little to do. If it had been upto me (and it is for the best that it isn’t, and will never be), then fitness permitting, Prasidh Krishna would have played in place of Nitish Kumar Reddy.

Absent rain, or some miraculous bowling by Jasprit Bumrah, Australia will win the 3rd Test. They’ll win it because India didn’t pick enough bowling to compete in it.