Ghambir also gave the incident short shrift.
“It’s a tough sport played by tough men, you can’t be that soft,” Ghambir said after Australia reclaimed the Border-Gavaskar Trophy with a six-wicket win.
“I don’t think there was anything intimidating about that. Usman Khawaja was taking his time and he [Konstas] had no business being involved with Jasprit Bumrah.”
Sam Konstas and Jasprit Bumrah late on Friday at the SCG.Credit: AP
Pat Cummins duly backed the teen tyro.
“I think people mistake a bit of confidence with bullying or abuse,” he said.
“You’re allowed to walk around with your shoulders puffed back and play a few shots. I don’t think that’s illegal. But some people really take offence to that and want to put him back in his place. We say the same to all our players, just bring yourself every day.
“Be yourself, go about it how you think represents yourself and how you want to play. I think he’s been really good this series, he’s stood up for himself as he’s needed to.”
Sam Konstas trudges off the SCG after a cheap fourth-innings dismissal.Credit: AP
Taking Gambhir’s comments on Konstas’s conduct with a grain of salt, the former opener’s other suggestion – “that you can’t just go out there and keep smashing it from ball one. You’ve got to respect red-ball cricket” – is the advice more likely to be repeated by Cummins and McDonald once things quiet down.
With India’s talismanic spearhead Bumrah unable to bowl and the series on the line, Konstas started Australia’s chase as if his sparring partner was still part of the attack. No bad thing, until it was.
In another time for Australian cricket, small to challenging fourth-innings chases paralysed the best batsmen of a generation, with several last-innings digs in the late-1990s falling short, prompting the aggressive recalibration championed by Steve Waugh’s sides.
Konstas marched down the track to the second ball he faced and was pummelling Mohammed Siraj over cover a few deliveries later.
India’s opening bowlers sprayed wides, byes and boundary balls in response and within three overs had 35 less runs to play with, in no small part to what is already becoming a classic of the Sam Konstas genre.
The real headline came with an echo of fellow pyromaniac Rishabh Pant’s MCG dismissals – with Sunil Gavaskar’s “stupid, stupid, stupid” reverberating for days after – when Konstas lost his head, the plot and his wicket.
Trying to hoik Prasidh Krishna out of the ground only got him as far as mid-off.
Buy the ticket, take the ride was the erstwhile lesson of Hunter S Thompson championed by Pant’s breathtaking 61 a day earlier.
But as Australia wobbled following Konstas’s exit, hindsight threatened true recriminations.
This is the same ground where Damien Martyn – regarded, like Konstas, as the most prodigious of his generation – flashed a lairy square drive with South Africa’s low target in sight 31 years ago after all, infamously spending seven years in the Test wilderness for his sins.
Test cricket’s turbo-charged evolution – and Australia’s approach under Cummins and McDonald – ensures Konstas will be backed in. But it doesn’t mean he can’t learn and evolve either, as any 19-year-old with two Tests to his name should.
Ex-English captain Michael Vaughan wasn’t wrong lamenting “he’s a better player than that,” in Fox Commentary when Konstas tossed his innings aside.
As Kevin Pietersen’s skipper for England, he offered similar counsel to the one-time skunk-haired debutant, with Pietersen later crediting Vaughan for keeping his head on his shoulders.
Perhaps the most surprising development in Konstas’s career is that the two Tests witnessed by two nations have been played almost entirely at odds with the cricket he’s played for a decade before it.
For all his ramps and running down the wicket to Bumrah and co, NSW and grade-cricket observers have long rated him as a generational talent largely due to a sound, rounded technique matched with composure.
Konstas’s reputation coming into Test cricket was for batting long and often, scoring hundreds for fun at all levels, building to triple figures rather than blasting. No-one’s really seen him bat with such abandon – to the point it was reckless – until he took to the biggest stage.
Of less concern is the combative approach and the chirping of opponents, which the cricketing public loved, right up until they didn’t.
As Cummins said: “You’re allowed to walk around with your shoulders puffed back and play a few shots.”
Konstas is 19, and two Tests into his career. He’ll learn when to throw his punches, and when to pull them.
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