Spare a thought for Jason after O‘Keefe’s feat
The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events
So what happened in Pune? And if Australia are 300plus runs better than India and India are an innings and lots better than England, what will happen when we play Australia next?
We know these are silly questions but it is remarkable that a 32-year-old slow left arm bowler with only four Tests behind him should manage to outbowl Ashwin and Jadeja in India.
It was, though, a spinners’ pitch in a way that none of the pitches for England’s matches had been, and Steve O’Keefe, given his first-class record (237 wickets at 22.90), may after all be a better bowler than we thought, even though he seems to have been picked only after every other spinner in Australia had been tried.
One possible influence here, as a slow left armer who has bowled well in India, is Monty Panesar, who had been asked along to give the Australian spinners some advice before they left.
A few years ago an Australian slow bowler took 12 wickets in a Test in India, at Nagpur in 2008. His name was Jason Krejza but they cost him a remarkable 358 runs, with a first innings analysis of 43.5-1- 215-8. Krejza played one more Test, in which he took 1-204, and then returned to obscurity, having conceded over 100 runs in each of the four times he bowled in a Test. But his firstclass figures were nothing like as good as O’Keefe’s – he had, at the end of his career, 114 wickets at 49.59.
In recent years real surprise results in Test cricket have been rare with everyone (except Zimbabwe) winning at home and losing away.
There are surprises in the shorter forms of the game, because fortuitous events can have much more impact in the shorter game, with less time to recover from a stupid run out or a dropped catch. But this one – India twice out for just over 100 after piling up runs against England as if bowlers didn’t exist – is one of the most surprising.
So was this a freak result, complete with Virat Kohli’s worst home Test match? Or are Ashwin and Jadeja not so good on a real turner? It is unlikely that we will see its like again in this series.
This game was played at the Maharashtra CA ground .. but it was the Subrata Roy Sahara Stadium in Gahunje, a new stadium built in 2012 and staging its first Test match. With Tests to come at Bangalore, Ranchi and Dharamsala, who can say? We have interesting Test cricket again!