On people’s Monday at the people’s ground, at the end of the best-attended MCG Test of all time, the loudest roars were all for Australia.
They came, primarily, from the enormous final-day crowd of 74,362, finding their most raucous voices for Nathan Lyon’s final lbw verdict against Mohammed Siraj at 5.23pm. The total attendance of 373,691 can say they were part of a great Test match, as well as a great event.
Pat Cummins thanks fans as he leaves the MCG after day five of the Boxing Day Test.Credit: Justin McManus
It has been a joyous week in Melbourne, spiced with a little heat, but essentially played in the sort of spirit that the game deserves. Epiphany is not quite here, but this game felt like one.
But the noise emanating from the tight Australian huddle surrounding captain Pat Cummins was significant too. To beat India here, in a hard slog of a Test match by taking 10 wickets on the final day and seven in the final session, will be cherished as perhaps the finest of all wins for his team.
By their toils and ultimate triumph, they rose to meet an occasion presented by the unprecedented love from spectators. As he had also done in Lahore in 2022 and Melbourne last summer, Cummins weighed up the fourth innings resources at his disposal and calculated correctly.
But those two occasions were against Pakistan, a team always liable to offer a chance. This was India, a team that has not tasted a series defeat to Australia in a decade, and a team filled with players with reason to be confident against the hosts.
That will be why the final day’s proceedings feel so satisfying for Australia.
Cummins, it turned out, did not need a small crack at the Indian top order on the penultimate evening. He did not need a full day five, allowing Nathan Lyon and Scott Boland to keep batting until Jasprit Bumrah had plucked his 30th wicket of a remarkable series. He did not even need the second new ball in the end, with the final over of the first ball’s allotted 80 overs sufficient.
The pitch had enough in it for Cummins and Boland, who each put in sterling shifts to claim three wickets apiece. Their combination of accuracy, seam movement and the odd bit of variable bounce has long been ideally suited to the MCG surface.
A double strike early in the innings, defeating Rohit Sharma and then the limpet-like KL Rahul, was significant for Cummins, meaning that there was an enormous amount of time left for the remaining seven wickets to fall.
Mitchell Starc was briefly annoyed by some speculative appeals from his slips cordon early in the innings, when he could see daylight between the bat and the ball. But he contributed the vital wicket of Virat Kohli, offering up the wide tempter that has become the Indian superstar’s kryptonite. But for a hair’s breadth DRS call, Starc would also have defeated Yashavsi Jaiswal lbw.
Through a long afternoon partnership between Jaiswal and Rishabh Pant, India kept both themselves and the crowd interested. They were largely untroubled by the ageing ball and Cummins’ selection of fields. The last over of the afternoon, composed of Marnus Labuschagne’s bouncers, did not suggest an imminent result.
Sam Konstas celebrates Jaiswal’s dismissal.Credit: Getty Images
At tea, Cummins chose to be more speculative. He was also conscious of Australia’s over rate troubles this game. The ball was thrown to Travis Head, who on more helpful surfaces can spin the ball sharply. Here, his part timers were more friendly, but they carried just enough temptation to draw Rishabh into a swing for the midwicket fence. Mitchell Marsh juggled for the second time in the day, but held on.
It fell to Cummins to take the most important wicket of the day, that of Jaiswal. His gambit was to try an off cutter slower ball bouncer, a product of the Twenty20 age, to coax a cross bat shot after quicker short balls had been ignored. Jaiswal swivelled and touched, Alex Carey caught.
The subsequent controversy was driven primarily by umpire Joel Wilson’s hesitation to give decisions this afternoon, plus the vagaries of an ultra-edge system Cummins confessed to lacking confidence in.
That dismissal knocked the stuffing out of an Indian side that had reached the team break still dreaming of a 2021 Gabba reprise. From this point, the tourists were in what has become a most uncomfortable place for batters to be in the T20 age: trying to defend.
“The really positive players are at their best when they’re putting pressure back on the bowlers and playing their shots,” Cummins said. “So if you take them away from their natural game, you absolutely feel like you’ll get more chances.
“The more times you’re getting people defending and you’ve got the ability to have helmets around the bat and extra catchers in, you feel like you’re in the game.”
Victory: Nathan Lyon gets Mohammed Siraj lbw.Credit: Getty Images
It was in failed attempts at dead bats that the remaining wickets all fell. So quickly did they subside, even with another odd non-decision by umpire Wilson, that the game was over little more than 10 minutes into the final hour.
Cummins, undeniably, knows his men and their capabilities. He also knows his own, and with another supreme batch of bowling spells, plus innings of 49 and 41, was rightly judged man of the match and winner of the Johnny Mullagh Medal.
He can look back with satisfaction, too, at the decision-making that helped to set things up. The call to include 19-year-old Sam Konstas as a circuit-breaker at the top of the order also made this match an outlier in recent times because it will be just as valuable for the future as the present.
After a night’s celebrations, the SCG looms large. Cummins has the opportunity to receive the trophy in Sydney from Allan Border, another captain who left Australia very much in his debt after many memorable occasions like this one.
