ISomething’s wrong. Brisbane feels like any other day in town ahead of the Australia-India Test. Men carrying boxes of mangoes walk down Queen Street, performing a ritual of asphyxiation in Queensland’s humid conditions, and the city’s atmosphere reluctantly shifts along the river’s meandering path. . However, the Gabba Test just doesn’t feel the same.
For more than 30 years, this has been the place where Australian teams have been unbeatable. Pointed out by the iconic heavy drumbeat, the previous visiting winners were the great West Indies team of 1988. The message was that achieving this feat required the greatest effort in history. But that’s no longer the case.
It was India who broke that spell four years ago with a monster chase built on Cheteshwar Pujara’s standards of pain and Rishabh Pant’s audacity. Two years later, South Africa lost in two days, but they could have easily won in two days on a lottery pitch that saw Australia trailing 34th place within four wickets. Then, in January this year, the much weaker modern West Indies had a moment of reversal. , young unknown Shamar Joseph held up nine fingers and tore apart the home team, denying them a chase they should have walked.
None of this means Australia can’t win in the next five days or will need five days. It means that the possibility of things going in a different direction is concrete, not just a wishful dream. India will know they can win if they bat correctly. The ‘if’ is huge, but so is the potential prize money, and a series lead over the Melbourne and Sydney games should be a much better fit than the previous three games.
Another thing that has changed is the position of the Gaba in the order of business. In Australia, the country with the longest human civilization and shortest memory, doing something twice is a tradition. So Brisbane, the first Test of the season, came to be seen as immovable and eternal, despite a season in which it was not. The world expected the visiting team to be defeated before they could differentiate Vulture Street from Stanley.
Brisbane are rarely in first place anymore and Cricket Australia’s schedule plans won’t allow them to be in first place for at least the next five seasons. This change means you can get the Gabba test with authentic context, even though it may throw some people’s internal seasonal compass out of whack. First place meant the only concern was whether there would be enough rain or a flat enough pitch for the touring teams to escape with a draw. Well, the Brisbane match begins with the two teams tied 1-1, but there are even more reasons to be interested.
The third change is that this test will return before Christmas. In the winning decades, tests tended to take place in November or December. Australia’s two defeats here in the past four years have both come in January, with a month or two left before the summer heat hits the decks. Only curators can say whether that makes a difference, but it might. The January test was different even before the results were.
Josh Hazlewood has been deemed fit to play and has had an impressive run since his debut with 5 for 68 against India 10 years ago. Pat Cummins is also doing noticeably better than his career numbers here. A return to the previous schedule may mean a return to historical averages, with Australia’s fast bowlers beating a batting order unsuited to pace, bounce and movement.
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That would be expected on Ireland’s clichéd green pitch. However, looks can be deceiving as the Brisbane Strip is known to various visitors at its cost. Color is often cosmetic, and one of the purposes of cosmetics is to hide more obvious realities. Many of the Gaba Tests are defined by slow batting over many days, rather than bursts of fast bowling.
Even if it lends itself to faster art, Australia has two unique problems. That is the currently unstable batting order and the matchup with Jasprit Bumrah. As India learned at their own expense on the spin track in the recent match against New Zealand, home conditions that are too toxic for bowling can be as detrimental to your batting as it is to your opponent’s. Much depends on how that blade of grass behaves, and as history teaches those who read it, no amount of digging into the record will help predict that.
