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Multiply Warne-on-O'Keefe by one billion, and you have India's pre-match opinion of Australia's cricketers

Malcolm Knox

Moments after Nathan Lyon took the 20th Indian wicket to fall in Pune, my son commented: 'Dad, didn't you say Australia would lose the series six-nil?'

His knowing smirk, which I had come to think of as the permanent face of 15-year-olds, this time expressed genuine, candid, open glee. My prediction of a six-nil loss in a four-match series had been merely weird. This – Australia winning by 333 runs, no less – was funny. That Australia now lead one-nil brought the boy not only great happiness in its own right, but the added bonus of knowing that his father was not just wrong, he can never be right. Even if India win the next three matches, Dad will still be wrong. Forever.

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Australia one-nil up with huge win

12 wickets in the match for Steve O'Keefe and a superb Steve Smith century set up an incredible win over India in Pune on day three.

In sport, there's always a fine line between what brings the greater happiness: your success, or someone else's failure. If they can coincide, all the better, but if your side cops a thrashing, seeing your enemy lose can bring rich consolation. Remember the celebrations of Chelsea and Manchester United fans when Leicester won the premier league? The most important thing to them was not what had happened to their own teams, but that Arsenal failed to win.

Joy in the misfortune of others is what turned the Pune Test match into such an unforgettable event. In an attempt to create a diversion, I explained to my son that far greater cricket brains than mine were confounded.

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As expert qualifications, Shane Warne has 708 wickets and 145 Test matches on the rest of us. His opinions carry weight – real weight, real substance, that neither diuretics nor plastic surgery can diminish. But his disregard for Steve O'Keefe's bowling strayed beyond opinion and wandered across the line to persecution. His harping on and on and on – and (take a ciggie break) then on some more - about O'Keefe's limitations seemed personal and spiteful. Even when Warne larded Lyon with extra-sweetened praise, it sounded like yet another jab at O'Keefe.

It needs to be stated: until lunch on day two in Pune, the greatest tweaker of all time believed that the salvation of Australian spin lay in Mitchell Swepson and Ashton Agar. Anyone but O'Keefe.

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Why, beyond professional reasons, did Warne take such a personal set against the left-armer? Who knows? But at the end of Australia's first session in the field, I did say that I really hoped O'Keefe took a bag of wickets. (Two days later, I tried to remind the 15-year-old of my retrospective prescience, but he'd stopped listening to has-beens.)

By lunch on day two, I was even more of an O'Keefe man than I claimed to have been already. Not just because I like O'Keefe, one of the truly genuine people in the game, but because Warne's commentary was so over-the-top nasty. Big kid picking on little kid. Schoolyard stuff. Nonetheless, partly because I give credit to Warne's views on spin bowling, I had no expectation that it would happen. Maybe if O'Keefe jagged two or three, that would give old Warnie a black eye.

When O'Keefe broke through, again and again, a wicket for every put-down, Warne was not exactly contrite. He attributed O'Keefe's success to a change of ends, repeating this line often enough to make it sound like Steve Smith – a great backer of O'Keefe, who had every reason to feel vindicated by events – had made a mistake by bowling O'Keefe from the wrong end initially. Then Warne kept repeating (as he does) that the change of ends caused O'Keefe to 'get his mojo', as if said mojo had been lying around like a mislaid pair of batting gloves. An apology for his relentless sledging of O'Keefe? Didn't catch that. He almost implied that his criticisms had been productive. The next step will be to claim credit, as he did a couple of years ago when his comment that Mitchell Starc was 'soft' apparently spurred the paceman to get hard.

Anyway. It's for O'Keefe to say, Shane, stick a SOK in it.

As much as Warne over-invested himself in denigrating O'Keefe, the way events transpired could not be said to be Warne's misfortune. It's not quite schadenfreude. True schadenfreude is the enjoyment of India's U-shaped gun barrel when it came to pitch preparation. Multiply Warne-on-O'Keefe by one billion, and you have India's pre-match opinion of Australia's cricketers. The lunar surface presented in Pune, apparently ordered from space station BCCI, was meant to achieve the same result as when South Africa toured the subcontinent last year. So much hubris was about, it didn't strike anyone that the toss would make any difference.

Australia would be that hapless with bat and ball that it wouldn't matter. India's administrators – and whoever else applied pressure for such a wicket, including Virat Kohli – found themselves in a similar position to the PWC numbats who handed out the wrong envelope for the best-picture Oscar. They only had to do one thing right, prepare a decent wicket such as Pune customarily does for domestic cricket. They got it spectacularly wrong in every way, like an evil villain poisoning the guest's drink before inadvertently drinking it himself. PWC's blunder means no chance of providing any future accounting services for Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Cop that! For the people of Pune, which was on trial as a Test venue, the consequences will be more severe.

Seeing an over-confident, over-tricky India lose, which was true schadenfreude, invoked almost as much happiness as seeing Australia win. Seeing Shane Warne bet all-up on his mouth and lose was almost as cheering as seeing O'Keefe, Smith and their team pull off a grand victory. Imagine being a teenager and seeing your dad make a complete dill of himself – that's how good it felt.

Me, I'm off to fill in my rugby league tips. I look forward to half a season of cheering for my team to win, and a second half cheering for someone else to lose. Or, as it's known in our house, Dad searching for new ways to be wrong. As for the cricket, here, my boy, is a gold-plated forecast. It doesn't matter what kind of pitches are doctored in Bangalore, Ranchi and Dharamsala. Australia to win the series six-nil.

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