This was the first day of the rest of Sam Konstas’s cricket life. The tyro opener wasn’t even trying to do anything funky when Jasprit Bumrah sheared through his half-defence. Konstas gave Bumrah something to think about in the first innings, Bumrah returned serve in the second. That’s Test cricket.
Bumrah added three further wickets in a devastating mid-afternoon burst, giving this day its shape and direction, but finished it in a counterintuitive pose of hands-on-knees abjection as he cost himself a wicket with a no ball in the last over and perhaps lost India’s last foothold in the match, too. That’s also Test cricket.
Jasprit Bumrah electrified India’s late charge in the Boxing Day Test, but left the field dejected after a no ball he bowled cost India the wicket of Nathan Lyon.Credit: Getty Images
This match, this series, is turning into a kind of mini halcyon day for the game. Konstas and Bumrah are playing their different parts along with many others by further broadening the horizons of what was already the format with the richest possibilities. Now they’re wider and more tantalising again.
Fans are lapping this up. With a good and possibly epic day to come (at a discount price, too), the aggregate is already nearly 300,000, a Boxing Day Test record, harking back in sepia to a time when there was cricket but only cricket for the public’s delectation. The Indian diaspora makes up half, of course, but that’s to celebrate, for assuredly they will be back.
Both teams have in prospect the World Test Championship final in mid-2025, and next summer the Ashes are on the block again.
At this point, I’m supposed to note what a boon this means for coffers, broadcasters and sponsors, but frankly, who cares about accounts when the cricket keeps adding up like this?
No agency could have come up with a better advertisement for Test cricket than this game.
There is the way the contest is born again every day, sometimes session to session.
On Saturday, there were hours at a time when the ball did not look like getting past the bat, though India’s numbers seven and eight were in residence.
On Sunday, on the same pitch, there were hours when the ball did not look like hitting the bat, though Australia’s top order were the occupants.
Yet, it was the same pitch, the same venue, a similar ball.
Australia, the world, might not have seen a fast bowling exponent quite like Bumrah.
His straight arm is like a cocked trebuchet as he takes his few steps in, his head leaning to one side as if to avoid the whirring arc of his own weapon. Unlike a trebuchet, he is relentlessly accurate as well as fast, which means he concedes few runs and often hits the stumps.
Like a trebuchet, he destroys.
Jasprit Bumrah bowls with a distinctive straight-arm style and celebrated his wickets in a similar manner on Sunday.Credit: Getty / AP
No bowler before him has reached 200 wickets while averaging less than 20. That tally excludes the wickets he buys for others when he takes a spell and batsmen relax fatally.
There are the game’s poles, brutality and beauty, “murder and poetry” as R.C. Robertson-Glasgow once summed up Don Bradman. The contest between Bumrah and Marnus Labuschagne was martial, and Labuschagne will have the bruises on midriff and forearm to validate it. Periodically, Labuschagne was literally knocked off his feet, but never off his mission. Their bout was pivotal.
Bumrah at times made the other Australians look like park players, beating them two balls in every three and sometimes crowding the estimable Usman Khawaja as if he were a number 11.
There is the butterfly effect by which the game often turns on the slightest contingency, barely noticed at the time. Australia needed runs and Steve Smith had the right idea when he thrashed at one wide and full from Siraj and was caught behind.
It was just one wicket, but 22 balls later, Australia had lost 4-11 and the game had lurched almost over the precipice. Australia’s triumph was to grab it by the legs and haul it back.
There was the obligation to balance the needs of the moment, the day and the match, for another is just around the corner and it will be decisive. To win but spend themselves out in the effort might prove pyrrhic.
Australia has its form and fitness woes, but the 18 extra overs last-wicket pair Nathan Lyon and Scott Boland forced India to bowl will have extracted their pound of flesh.
The 55 runs they made together tipped the day’s scales, too, though Australia will need to factor into its plotting the way batting became more comfortable as the day unfolded. For the second day in a row, just when it looked to be all over, it wasn’t.
Steve Smith’s wicket precipitated an Australian collapse.Credit: AP
The sting this time was for Bumrah to do himself out of a wicket in the last over, and for Lyon to add salt by gliding the last ball for four.
Stumps drawn, Bumrah stood for a long time alone on the pitch, his hands clutching his knees. How well he and India gather themselves up is now the question. Test cricket at least gives you a night to sleep on it.
There were the games within the game.
Australia needed more runs, but at first could not forge them, then later could not afford more wickets chasing them.
India needed wickets, desperately, but could not afford to barter away runs. It was and is 1-1, remember. As in a hung parliament, everything became a negotiation.
There were the five catches India dropped, none easy, but anyone of which might have tilted the match again. In counterpoint, there was the miscommunication between old mates Pat Cummins and Mitch Starc that cost Starc his wicket, run out, which for all anyone knew then would leave Australia short.
In this match especially, there has been the added theatrics, one good gee-up deserving another. Konstas, Bumrah, Siraj, Virat Kohli: all have led this line. Kept within bounds as it has been, this byplay adds to the frisson.
If Test cricket ever was really too solemn for its own good, it is not now. It’s full of chutzpah, charm and cheek.
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