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Australia romp India on French Open pitches

Roar Guru
25th February, 2017
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Mitchell Starc should be saved for Test cricket. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)
Roar Guru
25th February, 2017
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2043 Reads

So what can Australia make of the quite extraordinary outcome in Pune?

A fair few things, obviously, but they would be mindful to take even deeper circumspection than they might have had they lost.

I will put my hand straight in the air, and own up to the fact that I had little to no faith in Steve O’Keefe, and for that I make absolutely no apologies. Before this Test match, O’Keefe had no five wicket hauls in Tests, no ten-wicket Tests. Now he has two and one respectively.

So he has impressively and prodigiously proven myself, and many, wrong. Well done and good luck to him.

Anyone who pulls on the baggy green for Australia, if they are doubted and put in a performance such as that, quite rightly deserve the accolades and applause directed toward them.

Australia's Steve O'Keefe celebrates the dismissal of India's Ajinkya Rahane

A lot will be made of the fact that the Indian spin brigade spoke pre-game words of fire, and came out cold, while an Australian spin-duo of fair to moderate returns to date stayed humble, and burned through the Indian batting line-up like a hot knife through butter.

How on earth did that happen? How did an Indian attack that is born top-spinning in the womb fail to do to Australia what happened to them?

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A lot was made before the match about the horror that awaited the tourists in a spin-friendly pitch that had been baked to perfection. It was to be Australia’s ‘Nightmare on Pune Street’, with Ravichandrin Kruger throwing down daggers.

And throw them he did, with ample help from his spin brigade, the Australians finding themselves at sixes and sevens, chasing deliveries, most often failing to get bat on ball.

Noticeably, India was able to hit O’Keefe and Lyon so well that they were hitting the ball to a fair few fieldsman.

So, for all the talk about the pitch working against Australia, was it India who ultimately fell victim? Did the pitch spin too much?

India baked a pitch so spin-friendly that the ground staff from Roland Garros were seen in India, but if you are spinning a ball on a surface that spins it even more, granted, the ball is hard to hit, but it is nigh on impossible to even get close to.

O’Keefe and Lyon on the other hand, instead played to the conditions, spun the ball as best as they could, which is with less revolutions than India, managing catches in the first innings, and lbw’s galore in the second.

steve-okeefe-australia-cricket-2017

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Look at Kohli in the second innings.

In the tradition of O’Keefe’s namesake, Kerry, Virat’s first mistake was playing for spin. And, ultimately, you can’t leave a ball that is pitching outside off, and going on to hit off.

However, the pitch allowed Australia’s spinners, rather than turning at right angles, to throw down deliveries with enough slight variation to genuinely confuse batsman.

The mistakes of the first Test in Pune will be analysed and re-worked by India, and Australia would be mindful not to rest on their laurels, take the victory in their stride, and fix their own backyard before Bangalore.

Which brings us to the Marsh brothers.

If a sign of madness is repeating the same mistakes over and over again, hoping for a different result, then Australian Cricket is a psychological basket case.

20. That’s the combined number of runs contributed by the Marsh family in the first innings. 51 for the entire Test I believe.

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And that would be bad enough if it was one player, but that’s the contribution from two.

Both players may well go on to score tens of more runs in their careers, but here’s the deal: they should not be in a position to have the chance.

Not anymore.

The Australian Cricket team, and its selectors really need to come up with better than justifying the selection of non-performing players for contrived reasons of ‘suiting the conditions.’

Usman Khawaja left out? Seriously?!

It turns out that being inept at playing spin is, apparently, worse than being inept at playing cricket generally. I’m surprised Starc wasn’t dropped for the return of Jason Gillespie, because of that one time he scored some runs on the sub-continent, albeit against Bangladesh.

The lack of accountability for consistently, and entirely illogically placing blind faith placed in the Marsh brothers, demands an explanation to a country who are sick and tired of watching the Australian Cricket team fail because of their place being maintained in the team.

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It has gone beyond a joke, and not even an historic victory should paper over the gaping hole-like crack in our batting line-up that exists because of two players out of their depth.

Myself, and several others, are that perplexed by the selection, that we have reached the stage where we would settle for Glenn Maxwell batting four, rather than Shaun Marsh.

Australian batsman Shaun Marsh

Ridiculous.

Remember that talk of regeneration after Hobart? Of the cricket team now doing something new?

Yeah, that is now merely three players – Renshaw, Hanscombe, and Wade. And Wade isn’t even anything new. So, all that talk about the re-birth of the cricket team was simply that: talk.

It was spin (with no assistance from the Pune pitch) given to a public apparently solely to tide them over during the Pakistan series, so that we could lower our guard again when normal transmission resumed.

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And here we are, our batting crumbling again, due to a weakened batting line up, as soft as the marshes within it. Remember, a victory we may have had by 333 runs, but we could not score in excess of 300 in either innings.

For all the triumph spoken of over four Tests against South Africa, a mentally fragile Pakistan team, and now a first up win in India, it turns out it’s the same old Australian team, with the same old spin, though that spin is now assisted by Indian ground staff.

Australia should take this victory with a grain of salt, and two batting changes for game two.

Please feel free to follow me and disagree with me on Twitter @KdogRoars

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