Australia 2-1 Up As India's Hedge Fails

India have had a problem all series. They haven’t been playing enough threatening bowling for the conditions. This has been a popular choice. Most fans, and even many former players, find the question of runs from number eight competitively significant. The urge to be respectable rather than competitive in a sport contested by selections (rather than players contracted to franchises) has a long history, especially as far as the Indian Test team is concerned. I suspect that if you polled every Indian Test player from the last 50 years, a majority would say that three all rounders and three fast bowlers offers better balance than 4 fast bowlers and 1 all rounder. Nitish Kumar Reddy provided elegant proof of concept for this proposition.

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.