BGT 2024-25 Perth Test
Note - This article is not an in-depth data analysis. This newsletter was not meant to have only data insights but a few silly stray thoughts too; hence the lame name kept for the sake of rhyme (wicked cricket). But one doesn’t choose what one ends up doing. Data came along and we went nuts with it. There will still be a fair bit of data-heavy pieces occasionally, but pieces like today’s will be more regular. Hope you enjoy reading it.
There were a few truisms floating around about the conditions in Perth and all of them turned out to be true.
The first among them - there would be a lot of extra bounce on the pitch and touring teams generally find it difficult to adjust.
There was bounce; and in the first innings, the Indian batters did struggle (Kohli got out to a ball that bounced too much for too little correction in length on the shorter side by Hazlewood). But ‘struggle’ in a competitive game is relative. So, when the Australians got all-out on 104, it was clear that 150 all-out was not one of those collapses that bring out invectives against the so-called IPL crybabies who had forgotten to bat long and should immediately be sent to take tuitions from former greats. In the first innings though, it was the lateral movement that made batting so difficult for both the teams.
The second truism - scoring becomes easier with the soft ball, so batters should find a way to survive initially; and to score, wait for the ball to get old.
This too, turned out to be true. Only, the waiting was not like waiting at a bus stop where the fiercest nemesis you can possibly face is boredom, not Josh Hazlewood’s relentless off-stump channel bowling on a seaming pitch. His bowling makes the batter leave a lot of his batting to chance. Scoring is a dream that occasionally comes true with edges miraculously breaching the slip cordon. It’s the test of the batter’s technique of letting the ball go, in the most literal sense. And what technique KL Rahul displayed. Against channel bowling, he brought the bat inside the line of his body which was perfectly aligned with the off-stump. He got out on 26 but more importantly, played 74 balls. More than a third of the magic mark of 30 overs after which the ball was supposed to get softer and batting a lot easier. By the time India reached that mark, they were already 6 wickets down.
Reddy played exactly the way a good prospect plays on debut. He got the best of conditions, as any prospect on debut should, and the most harmless of bowlers in those conditions - Nathan Lyon. He scored 4 boundaries against him. Pant did his thing and forced people like me to realign our definition of a responsible innings. He is being the most responsible when he is paddle sweeping Lyon from the stump line or hitting Cummins for a six in exactly the area manned by a boundary rider and, of course, rolling over on the ground, indicating that holding pose after playing a shot is passe.
The third truism - Jasprit Bumrah can induce a batting collapse at will on a wicket that has some help for pacers and Perth is known for helping pacers.
It shouldn’t be a truism. It should be wishful thinking, a distant dream, a what-if scenario that isn’t worth considering. But the great bowler keeps giving us evidence to the contrary. In the first innings, it took him just 3 balls to find his perfect length and 9 to convert it into a wicket. McSweeney, the first wicket, did nothing wrong. Against bowlers like Bumrah, there is very little the batters can do wrong, because to get out, they don’t have to. McSweeney found his perfect excuse in Bumrah for not scoring big, as few would hold it against him if that is the ball the debutant got out to. You can see the video of the wicket here at around 5.30 min mark -
For veterans like Smith, a similar argument can be made. When on song, Bumrah serves as a perfect excuse for batters with a range of experience and skills, when they underperform. I expected Smith to have some answer to the Indian attack in the second innings and he had. He had changed his guard and reduced his foot movement to counter the risk of lbw but made himself prone to the ball that, instead of coming in, stays straight. This is exactly how he got out in the second innings. It was Siraj who got him. This is him explaining it beautifully in this heart-warming video -
I am sure Smith will come back stronger in the upcoming matches and if fortune favors him, as it did the Indian batting in the second innings, the bowlers will have a hard time getting him out.
The mention of good fortune leads to the fourth truism - the Perth wicket is at its compliant best for a couple of days, before the sun bakes it dry and makes it crack. Until that happens, the bounce is true and lateral movement minimal.
India got to bat in these conditions in the second innings. It would be unfair to attribute a score of almost 500 only to conditions. Jaiswal and Rahul batted beautifully. Rahul in particular. The scoring shots he played were almost riskless and his defensive technique was top notch. Going forward, I am expecting the Australian bowlers to bowl a bit straighter to make his bat’s edge come into play. But only a bit. Just enough to not allow him to score on the leg side. That is for the future. For now, he can bask in the glory of what he was able to achieve. Jaiswal went for a few flashing drives and he would be thanking his stars for not getting out on them. The movement off the pitch was just enough for the ball to beat his bat and not take the edge. Barring these minor transgressions, he played like a master accumulator. It was heart-warming to see him leave the ball outside off-stump even after he had played more than hundred balls, which might not be such a big deal but it sure felt like it.
Kohli, who in the first innings had gotten out to an unplayable delivery for the umpteenth time, made full use of the conditions and the fact that the bowlers were tired. He scored heavily off the part-timers - Head, Marnus, and Lyon (only for these conditions). But not before fending off a fair bit of Starc, Hazlewood, and Cummins. It’s difficult to know these days what exactly a typical Kohli innings is. If responding to a ball on its merit without trying to be ultra-aggressive is what it is, then Kohli indeed played a typical Kohli innings.
A second innings lead of 522 on a pitch that had seen enough of the sun to crack open, was unassailable. When Bumrah and Siraj started relentlessly targeting the stumps again, there was no point in trying to chase it down or even play out the day. Even the fourth best pacer had a fair chance of extracting variable bounce from the pitch. Marsh, who was playing well, got out to one such ball from Reddy.
This was all I heard or read about the pitch at Perth. Off the pitch, there was something interesting that panned out. A player said something in the press conference and a divide in the dressing room was invoked.
Apparently, Josh Hazlewood gave a horrendous response to a press question about plans for turning things around on day 4. He said that probably you should ask the batters this question. He got a lot of flak for stating the obvious in the press conference. Michael Vaughan, with his penchant for making proclamations, said he had never heard an Australian speak like that in public. He went on about how the match was not over yet and found himself ‘staggered’ by the comment. Shastri, being the cliché-mongering poet he is, went for the obvious metaphor and equated the cracks on the pitch to some ‘mental cracks’ in the opposition. The players would know best how this mental thingy is related to the ebbs and flows of their performance, but the conversation around it is always entertaining. I almost expected Shastri to roar into the mic saying - ‘you know what they say about washing your dirty laundry in public - don’t do it’.
All in all, it was a regular test match for India. Not in the chest-thumping way of how Indians own Australian pitches now, having won the last 2 series outings there. But in a general way of how Indians respond to the conditions (which includes opposition bowling and batting) in the best way possible, given the resources available. This is what they probably did against NZ at home as well. This is what they’ll do in the upcoming matches. What remains to be seen, as always, is how the results will align.