The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Want to see O’keefe bowl on a good wicket: Harbhajan
Left-arm spinner takes 6 for 35 (12/70) to skittle hosts out for 107 as Australia beat India by 333 runs to end Kohli’s 19-match streak
ON SATURDAY, a ball went past Virat Kohli’s bat. This is not to say that it hasn’t happened before this season or that it’s some unexpected phenomena. But it’s unlikely that many of them actually registered. For, all his bat has seemed to do is bully the ball relentlessly and ruthlessly.
At the MCA Stadium in Pune though, the piece of wood that has been salivated over for the last six months, one that gave reassurance to anxious Indians and acted as the oasis of calm in prevailing chaos all around didn't even meet the ball. In fact it was taken away from the little red thing whirring towards it. The fortress didn't have to be breached, the gate was left open. As an imagery, there was none better to describe India's capitulation. The Pied Piper had forgotten his flute.
For good measure, Kohli turned around at least on three occasions to see whether his stumps actually had been knocked back. Each time he turned, the scene behind him only looked graver.
The target of 441 was not even in question. When India came out to bat it was only a question of how long they could survive. So well have they batted as a unit during the home season that you believed that the first innings submission was a freak misadventure not to be repeated again. But it was only to get worse. The Indian second innings only lasted 33.5 overs even if they bettered their first innings total of 105 by two runs, and it was O’keefe again who ran through them with a second six-wicket haul to end up with the second-most economical 12-wicket match haul in the last 100 years.
It also brought to an end Australia’s Testwin drought on Indian soil that had lasted 4,502 days—a figure which was revealed by skipper Steve Smith—and handed India their first defeat on home soil in 52 months. No wonder then that Smith & Co hung around in the changing-rooms of the MCA Stadium for many hours following the fall of the last wicket and were heard singing raucously even long after the Pune sun had disappeared behind the hills for good. The underdogs from Down Under had just bitten into the No.1 Test team’s incredible unbeaten run and sounded like they would be keen for a “hair of the dog” remedy come Sunday morning.
The middle-order collapse might not have been statistically as dramatic as the first innings, when India lost 7 for 11 but 7 for 30 is bad enough. It was one of those abject displays that we’ve seen from Indian teams overseas where the wheels don’t just come off, they seem to have been never installed in the first place.
Unlike the first innings where he fell to a loose swipe off Mitchell Starc, Kohli hung around for a while here. The pitch was only getting tougher. And the Australian spin duo was on a roll. The openers had not only come and gone with no impact; they’d also taken the two DRS reviews with them. Kohli plodded and prodded for a few balls. But like the other Indian batsmen he too seemed to have not picked up from Smith’s excellent exhibition of batting against spin earlier in the day. Rather than stay back and play the ball late, he kept lunging forward and looking to put bat to ball rather than the other way around. That is before he shouldered arms. The other batsmen simply surrendered without a trace of defiance.
As he walked back following his worstever performance in a Test on home soil, you wonder what would have hurt Kohli more. That their batsmen ineptly succumbed on a rank-turner to a late-bloomer who had been sidelined by his own country as someone who couldn’t turn the ball; or the fact that he and Nathan Lyon out-bowled India’s elitelevel spinners, ranked No.1 and 2 in the world?
For every big knock that Kohli has played, Ashwin has matched him with the ball in the company of Ravindra Jadeja. But here in Pune, despite all the cards seemingly stacked in his favour, the record-breaking off-spinner simply didn’t manage to get on top of the Aussies as he had the other teams. He did end up with wickets, seven of them in all, but that was inevitable on this wicket. That he simply couldn’t adjust his length accordingly like the Aussies did and run through them like O’keefe did should rank this performance — even if he might have recorded his worst figures in Chennai — as the most disappointing for the season. Jadeja seemed equally stubborn in not shifting his length to slightly fuller and he kept beating the bat more often than being productive.
Kohli though didn’t seem to find anything wrong with his bowlers and felt that it was the batting that had to carry the blame for India’s second-biggest loss in a home Test. He even quipped about how his spinners had turned the ball more than the Aussies but still seen their spinners take more wickets.
Kohli also played down the magnitude of the defeat even slipping in a “no big deal, it was just another international game” when asked about the collapse and called it a “reality check”.
And the Indian team even tried to put up a brave face by indulging in a game of keepuppy for some 20 minutes after the crowd had cleared.
But on a day they conquered Fort Virat and beat India at their own game, it was the Aussies who were upping their spirits, now with the belief that they could actually dare to even think about winning this series. ROLLING OUT a rank turner for the first Test was a double-edged sword, said off-spinner Harbhajan Singh, who termed the wicket at the Maharashtra Cricket Association Stadium as unfit for Test cricket.
“To be honest, that wasn't a pitch. Test cricket should last five days. You cannot play on such wickets where anyone runs in to bowl and takes wickets. I have played in over 100 Tests, and I know how hard I had to work to earn every single wicket,” he said.
Harbhajan, who is currently playing the Vijay Hazare Trophy in the national capital, reckoned that preparing such rank-turners can sometimes be a sure-shot recipe for disaster. “When you prepare such a wicket, you are making conditions favourable for the opposition as well. That's what happened in Pune. When I say a good Test wicket, I mean a strip where the ball does not shoot up from the first day itself,” he explained.
Forty wickets fell inside three days on the dry and abrasive wicket and Steve O'keefe, a fairly inexperienced left-arm spinner,walked away with the Man-of-the Match Award,claiming 12 scalps. The 36-year-old, however, viewed the Australian spinner's feats with a pinch of salt.
“I will have to see him bowl on a good Test match wicket. Not this one. Till then, I will reserve my comments,”he quipped.
The Punjab skipper said all that a spin bowler needed to do on this track was to bowl fast and be pin-point accurate.
“You don't need to flight the ball or anything. You just need to bowl fast and not give the batsmen room to either come down the track, or be able to manoeuvre the ball around. Bowling six deliveries in the same spot is all you need to get wickets on such tracks,” he explained.
Harbhajan felt the other inherent pitfall on playing on such tracks was that it would essentially bring the toss heavily into the equation.
Before the start of the series, the Punjab skipper said that the current Australian side was the weakest he had seen in years. Consequently, he had predicted the hosts to steam-roll Steve Smith's side 4-0.
“Today, my predictions have been proved wrong. I have been getting trolled on the social media for making this prediction,” he added in a lighter note.