India weren’t going to win in Australia. This wasn’t going to be a repeat of two years ago: Steve Smith and David Warner were back; Marnus Labuschange had emerged; and the bowling attack, in home conditions, remained formidable. India weren’t going to win with captain Virat Kohli, averaging 54.08 in Tests in Australia, going home after the first Test for the birth of his first child.
India certainly weren’t going to win after being bowled out for 36 in the second innings of the first Test at Adelaide. Even after bouncing back to win in Melbourne and drawing in Sydney, India weren’t going to win. Not at the Gabba, where Tim Paine couldn’t wait to get Ravichandran Ashwin. Not at the Gabbattoir, where Australia were last beaten in 1988 by a West Indies team of Greenidge-Haynes-Richardson-Hooper-Richards-Logie-Dujon-Marshall-Ambrose-Walsh-Patterson. Just imagine Richards was on paternity leave, and the bowlers and their back-ups were injured, replaced by an attack with 13 Test wickets between them. And imagine one of Greenidge or Haynes was replaced by a 21 year-old playing in his third Test, and Dujon was replaced by a 23 year-old, and that neither had made the XI at the start of the series.
No, India weren’t going to win. Not without Ashwin, Jasprit Bumrah, Ravi Jadeja, Mohammad Shami, Hanuma Vihari and Umesh Yadav, all injured by the end of the third Test. Not when only three players – Ajinkya Rahane, Cheteshwar Pujara and the recalled Mayank Agarwal – remained from the XI that started the series. Not when bubble fatigue and abusive fans were also factored in.
328 to win. On a fifth day pitch. India aren’t going to win.
But, waking up in the middle of the night for a piss, I wonder how they’re getting on. Might as well stick the radio commentary on. Two balls later, Gill is out. India aren’t going to win this. But Pujara isn’t going to lose it. Over his dead body. He is eating and wearing balls, as he has done throughout the series, resulting in impatient commentators talking a lot of balls, failing to appreciate the job he’s been doing in tiring out the Australian bowlers, in playing the longest of long games. If Pujara is doing his best to save the game, it sounds like his captain, with a brisk 24 from 22 balls, and the decision to promote Pant, has eyes on winning it.
I fall back to sleep at tea. 183-3. India aren’t going to win.
Yet they did. A win for the ages.
The kind of win that emboldens people to identify as fans of Test cricket, as purists with suitably sophisticated taste and intelligence to get such a complex and nuanced game. The kind of win that makes people nod sagely and conclude that a Test match, of all things, was a great advertisement for Test cricket. Test cricket, you’ll notice. Not cricket. Certainly not that T20 nonsense. You see, in these binary times, to love something is to hate something else. There is no and, just or. Messi or Ronaldo? Tests or T20?*
It was the kind of win that makes people think that Test cricket is [checks notes] dying, or at least facing some kind of existential threat. And that threat is T20. The kind of win that leads Simon Heffer, writing (if you can call it that) in a serious national newspaper (if that’s what you can call the Daily Telegraph), that the way to save Test cricket is to ban anyone who plays a white-ball match from red-ball cricket for a year.
There are reasonable arguments to be made that the conditions for Test cricket to thrive are suboptimal, that it’s being marginalised and that skills are being lost. The counter is to say it was ever thus, and that Test cricket is as alive and as well as it ever has been in my thirty-odd years of following it. Much of this is a direct consequence of white-ball cricket. Fielding and the broadening of scoring options, most obviously, but also psychologically. Maybe the acceptance of failure inherent in the fearlessness required in the IPL makes it easier to forget being bundled out for 36, makes it easier for run-chases like India’s – innings like Pant’s.
The real beauty of Pant’s innings was that it came in the same game – the same innings, concurrently for 23.3 overs – as Pujara’s innings. A great advertisement for cricket, in all its rich and varied and interconnected forms, you could say.
*Messi and Tests, if I had to choose.