India complete huge win over Australia after Travis Head merely delays the inevitable | Cricket

It’s fun to watch a day of Test cricket where nothing matters. Not any day of cricket really matters if we’re being honest, but a day where the game doesn’t even make a difference to the game itself. India in Perth on Monday had 522 runs up their sleeve and two days of bowling to take seven wickets on a pitch already showing erratic bounce. Wickets would fall and the match would end, regardless of the configuration. Travis Head hitting 89 runs and Mitchell Marsh launching some sixes en route to 47 was fun but didn’t change the calculus in the slightest.

Usman Khawaja was the only player with the pedigree to bat a day and a half late in a match, but he promptly fell to a move without measuring the bounce. Steve Smith is thought of in the same category, but has always had a mediocre record, hitting last, even during his god years – 70% of his career runs have come in the team’s first innings. This time he was out for 17. The lower order could not muster much and, as in the first innings, keeper Alex Carey looked the most controlled and confident in front of his specialist batting colleagues. He was last out for 36 and his team fell by 295 runs.

Australia has had some wild beatings in the last decade and is changing. They come to mind easily, and they need no more than the name of the land to retrieve the memories. Generally, though, it was games when the other team was always on top. Trent Bridge 2015 or Hobart 2016 saw Australia’s batting collapse immediately, and then condemned to be behind in the game. Johannesburg in 2018 saw South Africa go huge in their first innings. A flurry of thrashing by India saw Australia score around 200 and India 500 in reply. Cape Town in 2011 saw Australia collapse from a winning position, but at least that game was not far from over.

This thrashing feels different because after bowling only Australia were on top. South Africa at the Waca in 2016 is the closest equivalent, but even then the visitors reached a halfway decent 242. This summer’s visitors were all out for 150 within two sessions on day one. The post-mortems that write off this Australian team as destined for the scrap heap will test the quality of that performance. It was as good as fast bowling in tandem gets, supported by brilliant fielding. The subsequent shot ruined the effect, but shouldn’t diminish the effort.

In the end, though, it was a bizarre surrender from a position of such advantage. An overseas team in their first match of a series is not supposed to come back from 150 all out, let alone to the extent of taking a first-innings lead. So to an extent where they bat almost three sessions without losing a wicket. Yashasvi Jaiswal and KL Rahul became the sixth opening pair ever to make a double century stand on a tour of Australia.

The grind into the ground that followed, six wickets in the best part of two days, would have hurt all the more because the Australians weren’t just working, they were confused. Being behind from minute one – that’s sport sometimes, you can roll with it. But in this variation, as session after session of Indian batting drifted by, the facial expressions seemed to keep saying, “How the hell did this happen?”

How to handle that question is what comes next. The current Australian camp is about trying to stay calm, not overreacting to poor results; they did so with some success after two heavy losses in India last year. The wider public will be much less sanguine, with plenty of agitation for change for Adelaide in the way you’d expect after a humiliating defeat. How it happened will be the initial question that turns into the question of how to prevent it from happening again.

And while Australians worry or ponder or call up talkback lines to vent, for India this is an epochal Test match result in a country that until 2018 had never seen Indian series success and since 2019 has seen nothing but. Their last two Test tours in Australia have produced heart-stoppers in Adelaide and Brisbane, and two superb professional wins in Melbourne. They haven’t produced an absolute blow like this, the kind of victory that can send an opposing camp into disarray.

India have a young opener with seemingly limitless ability, a veteran master in the middle order, a wicketkeeper whose comeback to the game is a miracle beyond even some of the innings he plays, the best fast bowler in the world and a top-class supporting cast in both departments. They did not bother to pick two of the greatest spinners in their history and were not made to suffer for that choice. They have other serious players to bring back for the second Test, including their regular captain. One performance doesn’t guarantee the next, especially with 10 days in between, but looking at a vanishingly rare three-in-a-row tour of Australia, this team has given themselves the best possible start.