ANALYSIS
Follow UsYou’re watching a Test match featuring India. The batting side is three down, and out walks the No.5 batter with his side under considerable pressure.
The player in question, the No.5, is a left-hander. He’s known for his counter-attacking style of batting. He walks out to the middle and joins hands with a right-hander who is quite the polar opposite: boring, defensive, and, in a way, unappealing to watch. But he is super efficient.
The two, who have no resemblance whatsoever, however make for a fascinating pair. They commence their partnership.
Next thing you know, these two have taken the game away from the opposition. How? By being an outrageously good tag team, complementing each other to perfection. The leftie throws the punches. The rightie? Well, he absorbs the hits. Every single one of them.
Attack. Block. Attack. Block. Attack. Block. And BOOM, the opponent, before he realizes, is dead and buried.
Oh, you exactly know which partnership is being alluded to.
R̶i̶s̶h̶a̶b̶h̶ P̶a̶n̶t̶ a̶n̶d̶ C̶h̶e̶t̶e̶s̶h̶w̶a̶r̶ P̶u̶j̶a̶r̶a̶ Travis Head and Steve Smith are such a fascinating pair to watch, aren’t they?
Well, it stings when you’re forced to taste your own medicine but at The Oval on Wednesday, India were subjected to this cruelty as Head and Smith brutalized the bowlers in a manner very familiar to the Indian fans — albeit in a completely different context — to help Australia take charge of the World Test Championship (WTC) final.
Remember when, a week ago, José Luis Mendilibar’s Sevilla side out-Mourinho’d Mourinho’s Roma? This felt a bit like that.
Australia enjoyed a 10/10 day, a day beyond their wildest dreams, but they rubbed it in by out-Pant’ing, out-Pujara’ing India. That? Now that’s something that’s hardly ever happened in recent times.
After seeing the back of Marnus Labuschagne in just the second over after lunch, India would have envisioned restricting Australia to 250 and under.
They will resume action on Day 2 hoping to restrict Australia under 450, with Pat Cummins’ side flying high at 327/3.
Test cricket, well — it’s a funny sport.
***
It is almost as if Head, these days, simply cannot stop scaling new heights.
After an outrageous summer two years ago, he was out to prove a point last year, that his 2021 was no fluke. He did so emphatically, amassing 525 runs at 87.50 and a scarcely believable strike rate of 95.10.
He then smashed the ‘walking wicket versus spin’ tag in India, finishing the series with an average of 47.00, proving to be the side’s second-best batter behind Khawaja.
At The Oval, on Day One, he answered the ‘will his game hold up in swinging conditions in England?’ question in some style.
Prior to Wednesday, Head had averaged 17.07 across his previous 15 first-class innings in England. His last visit to the country in Australian colours saw him get dropped midway through The Ashes. It was for The Oval Test that he was incidentally axed.
Nobody that watched him bat on Day One could have remotely guessed that to be the case. For not only did Head look at home against the swinging and seaming Dukes ball, he willingly bullied the Indian seamers on an Oval wicket that was far from ‘flat’.
Indeed, by the time Head walked in, there was not a single cloud in the sky. And yes, the movement was not exaggerated by any means. But Australia had just lost their trump card for English conditions, Marnus Labuschagne, and at 76/3, were at the risk of collapsing like they did against the same opposition a couple of months ago.
And this was, mind you, a final. The stakes were at an all time high.
To smack a near run-a-ball 146* from there, against an attack boasting bowlers of the caliber of Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj, is just…..stupendous.
Here’s the thing, though: it was like every other Head innings from the past 18 months. And India got sucked right into it.
We don’t quite know how ‘prepared’ India were against Head. But what was non-negotiable was this: giving him any sort of width.
The numbers were there to see: in the 13 innings he played at home, Head feasted on width offered by pacers, averaging over 200. Against balls bowled well wide (fifth stump and beyond), he’d scored at an astonishing 132.5.
It was even more important to not offer any width (i.e. stay disciplined on a stump-to-stump line) to him early in his innings, for one of his methods of success is getting off the blocks ridiculously quickly.
In the group stages of the current WTC cycle, in Tests outside Asia, nobody had a higher SR in the first 20 balls than Head (70.9).
His method of madness was basically this: attack early -> quick start -> unsettle bowlers -> get eye in -> momentum successfully shifted -> carry on.
The Indian pacers, hence, needed to do one thing at all costs, which was to be at their best against Head first up. They weren't.
Siraj and Shami, who bowled 19 of the first 20 balls Head faced, were erratic with their lines and allowed Head to get off to a flyer. The southpaw flayed six boundaries in total, raced to 28 in no time. The momentum got shifted and well, the rest is history.
India, later in the day, found an effective ploy to use against the southpaw — bowl short, attack his armpits — but it was too late; by then Head had already moved to 80, by which point Australia had crossed 200 for the loss of just 3 wickets.
***
If Head’s knock was about aggression, counter-punching and taking the attack to the bowlers, Smith’s was all about soaking the pressure endlessly.
Consider this: on the day, Smith batted 71 more balls than Head. Despite that, he scored 51 fewer runs.
And yet, his knock was as pivotal for Australia as that of Head’s.
The Pujara-Pant comparison hasn’t simply been drawn loosely. When Pant was in his element against the Aussies two years ago, at the SCG and Gabba, Pujara faced 205 and 211 balls respectively. In terms of scoring, he did not hurt the opposition a lot, but he sucked the energy out of the bowlers. This, in turn, benefitted Pant.
Today at The Oval, Smith’s dead-batting was interminable. There was more than one occasion where the ball looked like it was there to be hit, but Smith was content with a dot.
In all, he played a staggering 181 dots today — which is just 11 fewer than every other batter combined.
Smith, though, knew exactly what he was doing. He consciously was taking miles off the legs of the Indian seamers, completely unbothered by his scoring rate. This was because he knew the runs would eventually come. That this Indian attack, minus Bumrah and Ashwin, does not have the excellence to sustain pressure, and will eventually present him with ‘hit me’ balls once they tire out.
His assessment was spot on. After toiling laboriously for the first 159 balls of his innings, striking 53 runs at 33.33, Smith collected 42 off his next 68 (SR 61.7). He hit as many fours (7) in his last 68 balls as he did in his first 159.
Andy Roddick once famously said about Djokovic, ‘"First he takes your legs, then he takes your soul.”
The same can be said about Smith.
Today at The Oval, he first took the Indian bowlers’ legs. And then he took their soul. All while batting at a control percentage of 91.2% on a day in which no other batter, Head included, had a control percentage of more than 80%.
Up for a GOAT debate, anyone?
***
From an Australian perspective, success came in two different, completely contrasting flavors, but despite the utter ridiculousness of both Smith and Head’s efforts, it is impossible to shrug away the feeling that India dropped the ball — on multiple fronts.
Did Rohit call it right at the toss? Perhaps yes, it is hard to make a concrete argument against it. Cummins, too, mind you, said he’d have bowled first.
But did India get their team combination right? The Ashwin debate aside, was it the right call to pick Umesh Yadav as the fourth seamer ahead of Jaydev Unadkat?
From what we’ve seen thus far, the answer for both questions seems to be a hard ‘NO’.
Still early days in this final, but India need to hit back, and hit back quickly. A couple of more dull sessions and this one-off Test might just be done for good.
