Australia Regain The Border-Gavaskar Trophy After A Decade

I can’t think of too much new to say. India have played the same Test match five times in this series - without a clear theory of how they’re going to get 20 Australian wickets. Jasprit Bumrah, by himself, is not an adequate theory though he has made India look a lot better than they are. India have picked two spinners in the 5th Test in a match in which Nathan Lyon bowled six overs. Their two spinners bowled four overs between them. Nitish Kumar Reddy, in theory India’s fourth fast bowler, bowled nine.

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.