Indian pair deliver lesson in substance on painfully long day
India's batsmen taught their guests a lesson over the weekend in Ranchi. The Australians have one day to show how much they learnt.
India's batsmen taught their guests a lesson over the weekend in Ranchi. The Australians have one day to show how much they learnt.
Steve Smith has entered the Himalayan stage of his career: so many mountains of runs, it is hard for individual peaks to stand out. His unbeaten 178 at Ranchi deserves to be remembered as a masterpiece of concentration and strength of mind. Mocked and even excoriated since Bangalore, the Australian captain willed himself to carry his team on his shoulders, and he did.
Who said sequels never work? The beauty of Monkeygate 2.0, or Monkeygategate as we call it here, is that it incorporates all the learnings from the original.
The deep wrestle for advantage, not the surface shenanigans, was what made this one of the great Test matches.
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.
According to the bookies, India are more likely to beat Australia in their Test series than Winx is to beat Mister Ed. If the Border-Gavaskar series, starting in Pune on Thursday, were to be played a theoretical 11 times, Australia would be backable to win it just once. At best. And even that is beyond punters' capacity for optimism.
At a forum on the future of professional women's sports last year, the retired Australian netball captain Liz Ellis asked despairingly: 'Would it be better for us if we were in the news for being out on the drink and disgracing ourselves?'
Just what is the Australian one-day cricket team anyway? An instrument of cricket diplomacy? An international aid organisation? A travelling circus? Whatever it is, we now know what it is not: a representation of Australia's best cricketing talent in the 50-over format.
If you are a bit of a galoot at a golf driving range, the fun thing to do is aim some shots at the cart driving around sweeping up balls. The prank is only conceivable because the threat is doubly harmless: the cart driver is enclosed behind a reinforced plastic shield, and the ability of said galoots to hit any target, moving or not, creates its own unlikelihood.
The retirement rate (if not the retirement age) has gone up by 50 per cent across the men's and women's games in the past decade.
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