Tea was due on day two of the Boxing Day Test and the contest was at an absorbing pass.
Australia spent the first half of the day making hay while the sun shone from a cloudless sky. On a pitch that had quickened up to a nicety overnight, there was plenty to make.
Steve Smith wound back the years as he wound up his arms, scattering the ball to all parts. He does not so much hook sixes as cast them over fine leg like a fly fisherman. This was his fifth MCG hundred; he loves the place like he loves his mum and his bat in no particular order.
Pat Cummins, playing a mix of conventional and Konstas cricket, had matched him blow for robust blow in a century stand that gave Australia the running in this match. Cummins in such a vein divides sentiment, between appreciation for what he can do and mystification about why hasn’t done it more often. But he doesn’t often get this batting conditions as blissful as this. He reaped.
About 85,000 were in the ground, a second-day record. Fortunately at the ’G, there was still elbow and leg room for all. A blind man could have followed the match by the crowd’s tunes and tones.
The Australian half were dwelling on the Scott Boland wicket that surely had to come. The Indian half – and it was half – wanted to see Virat Kohli the way some Catholics want to see Mary: desperately, but not yet.
Pat Cummins struck with a pearler to K.L. Rahul.Credit: Getty Images
Rohit Sharma had met another early and unconvincing end. But the tyro Yashasvi Jaiswal was growing into his work handsomely, walking out to quicks in a way that was part technical, part belligerent. He hit the ball as eagerly as all newbies, but as sweetly as the veteran Smith.
There is still room for orthodoxy and aesthetics in the grand old game. And KL Rahul was playing the sort of serene and composed innings that has made him India’s leading scorer in this series.
One ball remained. Cummins delivered it. It was full, but not too full, on that length that bets runs if there is no movement against wickets if there is. The odds this day had favoured batsmen, but suddenly, this Cummins delivery swung and seamed down the line of off stump, hitting the top of it, the grail of all seamers, pruning off the bail. Given six more looks at the same ball, Rahul would still miss it.
If his delivery ever comes up for auction, buy it. It belongs in a collection.
This is a Cummins thing. He is his own team’s best bowler, but he is also the bowler of the best balls. Mitch Starc’s best are unplayable, but you can see them coming.
Cummins produces them out of nowhere and just when they are needed. He’s done it repeatedly, at least twice to England supremo Joe Root. One of them, at Manchester in 2019, as good as saved Australia the Ashes. Before he was the captain, he was Postman Pat, who delivers. He still is.
It wasn’t the day’s biggest wicket. It wasn’t even the turning point in the day’s play. That would come a couple of hours later.
India’s next pairing produced more than 100 as Jaiswal moved into his youthful pomp and Kohli set about establishing himself at the crease, resisting temptation outside off stump with the discipline of a Buddhist monk. He even had his own chant.
The pitch’s sting drawn, Australia’s fell back onto more prosaic weapons, patience and perseverance. At least they had the afternoon for it. Temperate weather made for a temperate mood. At fine leg, Sam Konstas doffed his cap to the crowd and led them in overhead handclaps, making their frolics his the way Merv Hughes once did. He’s revelling in this Test cricket crowd.
Sam Konstas lifts his cap to the crowd.Credit: Getty Images
Cummins rotated his quicks, with himself as thread. Boland was plugged in for Josh Hazlewood and nothing was lost. It never is.
Cummins does not tire, nor miss a trick. At mids-on and off, he dives as often and well as Melissa Wu. The subtext of Australia’s endeavours was a message to India that much as they might feel themselves to be in a rhythm, they’d better not make even one misstep.
They did. Jaiswal’s run-out was calamitous, and was probably his own fault, but Kohli could have sacrificed himself to the man who looked good for at least a century. Instead, he turned his back. Cummins was the fielder, of course.
Perhaps Kohli’s egocentricity played on his mind, perhaps it did not, but an over later, he fished in the stream he had so fastidiously ignored, outside off stump. This is Boland’s territory, staked out long ago. He and the MCG patrons who stayed to stumps were alike in that they waited until their good thing came. The nightwatchman was a bonus.
Neither Cummins’s pre-tea pearler nor the late trio of wickets by themselves won this day for Australia. But they were a reminder than even in the most unpromising session of Test cricket, against the most resolute opponents, the next twist is only ever one inspired moment away, or India’s case one outbreak of leaving of minds, or on this day, both.
