At the Adelaide Test

The ABC statistician's diary of the Second Test between Australia and India

And so to Adelaide, the beautiful City of Churches, or as some of my radio colleagues like to call it, the Cemetery of Lights. I love this city; there are actual living people here, and they do usually seem to be having a good time, so I think there’s a hint of jealousy among the commentators. I do, however, mentally give a ticking off to the ABC’s Commissioner of Test Match Expeditions as my plane, packed to rafters with Eastcoasters coming to see the action, banks over the Adelaide Oval just prior to landing. I have been allocated a seat on the starboard side; the ground is on the port. Less welcome than the view is the forty-degree furnace that scalds me when I emerge. Fortunately, this will moderate somewhat as the Test proceeds.

Friday

• Deflating news for the day is that our skipper and veteran caller Jim Maxwell is unwell, confined to his hotel room with promises of “I’ll see tomorrow.” Unfortunately, recovery is slow, and the brevity of the match means that he misses its entirety. There are rumours that he called the first Test back in 1877, so it’s a shame he misses this latest one.

• The day is hot and heavy with humidity. The weather geeks promise showers, but they never eventuate.

• Coming into this Test after two consecutive home losses, weakened by injury to Josh Hazlewood, and with the hordes baying for Marnus’s blood, I check out calendar year performances to this point:

To have only the wicketkeeper in the playing XI averaging above thirty says little for the batting group, and one or two of them are justifiably looking over their shoulder.

• India wins the toss, which immediately gives them an advantage: If they bat well, they can insert Australia in the perilous environment of the night. If they don’t bat well, Australia gets to bat under lights anyway, so they are on a hiding to nothing. Night cricket at Adelaide is, of course, a different beast to the day game, as these session batting averages for the seven previous day/nighters at Adelaide show:

  • 1^st—25.89

  • 2^nd—36.20

  • 3^rd—24.82

  The surprise for me is how low the average for the first session is.

• The more immediate danger is to Adelaide’s flies. The diplomatic Rohit Sharma, about to do his post-toss interview, flails wildly at the insects bothering him, and mutters something that turns out a lot milder than it might have been if he didn’t have a microphone in his face. Thoughts turn immediately to Sydney’s Yabba, who 92 years ago reminded Douglas Jardine that they were the only friends he had in Australia.

• The Test starts sensationally as Starc traps wonderkid Jaiswal lbw first ball, repeating his first-ball antics of three years ago, when Rory Burns lost his leg-stump to a swinging yorker. Today’s was a similar delivery, and the fact that Jaiswal at least has a pad in the way doesn’t prevent his early exit. He, with 0, 161 and now 0, becomes the first player to score a century and two ducks in his first three Test innings against Australia. The previous closest was Pakistan’s Taufeeq Umar, with 0, 88 and 0 in 2002.

• I’m asked how often Starc gets a first-over breakthrough. My system isn’t quite that forensic, but I am able to report that he now has eight victims before the score is 2 in the first match innings of a Test. He’s just one behind Jimmy Anderson, whose longevity alone almost assures him of top billing in this race. Today Starc has moved beyond Kapil Dev and Dale Steyn, both with seven.

• I am able to report however, that today is the fourth time in Tests in Australia that a batter has perished to the first ball of a match. The previous three, AC MacLaren (1894-95), Stan Worthington (1936-37) and Rory Burns (2021-22), were all Englishmen. Starc has inflicted this pain on three occasions in all Tests, bringing him level with the unfortunate Hannan Sarkar of Bangladesh, who was so brought down by West Indian Pedro Collins in the space of eighteen months twenty years ago.

• India stutter against the revitalised pace of Mitchell Starc, whom (my colleagues are aghast to discover) hasn’t had a five-wicket haul in a Test in Australia for five years. His bowling average this calendar year (33.74) hardly gleams in comparison to team-mates Hazlewood (13.35), Lyon (20.56) and Cummins (29.45).

• Kohli strikes one beautiful boundary square on the off-side, then plays at one from Starc outside his eye-line, and edges to Smith at second slip. With another snaffle in the second innings, Smith moves to 188 catches, just eight shy of Ricky Ponting’s Australian record of 196. It might be touch-and-go for Smith to head that list, given his recent and subsequent disappointing batting. Dravid’s all-time record of 210 catches is more problematical again.

• Having made the early inroads, Starc cleans up the tail, finishing with 6-48, hisbest Test innings figures ever, relegating his 6-50 at Galle in 2016 to second best. Starc (5) is now equal second with Graeme Swann to Monty Panesar (6) in the list of bowlers with most six-wicket hauls without ever taking any more in an innings.

• India is mostly sustained by their new all-rounder, Nitish Reddy, who really does look a likely type—bats aggressively, and bowls medium-fast pace with equal intent. After two Tests, he averages 54.33 with the bat and 29 with the ball.

• Australia, as they feared, were obliged to bat in the perilous twilight, then under lights. They defied history by finishing at 1-86, losing Khawaja after 48 minutes, and exposing the out-of-form Labuschagne to the harshest of conditions. In the event, there were few alarms, and he finished with 20 runs off 67 balls at a time when survival was more important than scoring. The other player, the patient McSweeney, new to opening, finished the day on 38* off 97 balls, thus attaining his highest first-class score as an opener. The Indians would freely admit, I think, that they allowed him to leave more often than was good for them.

• I am able to calculate that the average number of wickets falling on the first day of Test matches between 2000 and 2019 was 6.69. Since then, it has grown to 7.38 wickets, a 10% gain. Today’s cricket has done nothing to lower that.

Saturday

• In conditions that should have been much easier than those of the previous evening, McSweeney lasted less than a quarter of an hour, and the luckless Smith soon followed him. Marnus at least profited by his hard work of the night before by getting to 64 before edging to gully, but even with this, his last ten Test scores include eight innings of six or fewer. Smith’s CV is similar: eight of his last ten innings have produced no more than seventeen.

• The innings that completely changed the trajectory of the match was supplied by Travis Head. Coming in at 3/103 and losing Marnus at 168, he so marshalled the Australian tail-end resources that he was able to see Australia’s score doubled from that point. In raw terms, he bludgeoned the Indian attack for 140 (17 fours, 4 sixes) off 141 balls in 184 minutes. His dominance was such that no-one else who batted solely today scored as many as 20, and his 140 was made while the Australian total rose by 207 off 239 balls. A South Australian, he clearly loves his home ground: In seven Tests there, he has been top scorer five times, and won the Player-of-the-Match award for the last three Tests at Adelaide. And so often he has made big runs while no one else has been able to make any. Today it was 140, with Marnus’s 64 next. Last year it was 119 to Khawaja’s 45. In 2018, it was 72 to Handscomb’s 34. And who can forget his 92 (Smith 36) on the Gabba minefield in 2022, which also determined the match result.

• In order to ingratiate myself with the locals, I produce a list of South Australians making Test centuries at Adelaide. To raucous applause, I announce that Head (3) now leads the pack, ahead of Ian Chappell (2), and brother Greg, along with Greg Blewett, Joe Darling and Clem Hill (one each). The one no-one gets is Clarence Everard Pellew, who made 104 in 1921.

• Jasprit Bumrah, clearly India’s bowling leader, finishes with 4-61, and thus brings his career bowling average down from 20.06 pre-match to 19.97. Since he now has 185 wickets, he joins a select group who have been able to reduce their average at some point in their careers to sub-20, while having more than 150 wickets under their belts at that time. This list consists of Waqar Younis, Ray Lindwall, Shaun Pollock, Ian Botham, and now Bumrah.

• India, 157 in arrears, are themselves forced to bat in the sub-optimal conditions of artificial light at the end of the day, and effectively lose the match by surrendering five wickets. Rishabh Pant, who waltzes down the pitch to his first ball and launches it over extra cover, is still there, however, and there is some hope he can enable a challenging target to be set for Australia to chase. Pant (80.7 runs per 100 balls) lies third in the table of batters sorted by strike rate for this calendar year, behind Duckett (88.1) and Brook (82.9) of BazBall—sorry, England—with Head (77.8) coming next.

Sunday

• In the event, India succumb rather meekly and Australia sew the match up well within the first session by ten wickets.

• Nathan Lyon delivers a lonely solitary over the match, the lowest number for him in Tests in which he has bowled. His previous record low was three overs. (This excludes the Hobart Test of 2022 v. England, in which he didn’t bowl at all!)

• With the Test finishing well inside three days, some match-length analysis is required. I discover this:

Tests of three days (or fewer) have risen from 14.3% to 21.1% of the total played in the last five years, compared with the decade before that.

• A welcome departure from protocol at the end of the match, when spectators are allowed onto the ground for a short while. The players spread themselves around the inside of the rectangle signing autographs:

The ABC Adelaide crew during a planning meeting. From left: Stuart Clark, Corbin Middlemas, Adam Jones, Aaron Bryans, Tim Verrall, Ben Cameron, Glenn McGrath, Andrew Moore, Darren Lehmann, Ric Finlay.

Adelaide Oval Bits and Pieces

• Everyone recognises the iconic Adelaide Oval scoreboard, built in 1911, but I’ve never seen an image of its rear in any publication. I rectify that omission here:

• More recognisable is the remarkable footbridge over the Torrens River which connects the Oval and its parkland precinct to the CBD. $40 million in 2014 seems a lot for such an asset, but I reckon it’s worth every cent:

• Just as a reminder that we are in the festive season, Rundle Mall in Adelaide’s CBD has become the temporary home to the largest Santa Claus known to man. Or maybe it’s permanent…

Ric Finlay serves on the ACS general committee, and as cricket statistician and scorer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.