Border-Gavaskar Trophy: Why the pink-ball Test in Adelaide can be a decisive game | Cricket News

A WEEKEND OF POSSIBILITIES: India Test squad training session at Adelaide Oval. (Photo by Mark Brake/Getty Images)

The pink-ball Test in Adelaide, despite its potential to be an outlier, offers both India and Australia a chance to throw defining punches at each other
Intrigue marrying spectacle. That’s what you get when the Adelaide Oval hosts the Australian summer’s customary cricketing fest. The Day Night Test match.
Border-Gavaskar Trophy
The pink kookaburra and the way it behaves especially in the twilight zone, provides the intrigue and the picturesque setting of the venue and the orange skies threatening to kiss the green turf in the evening, offers the spectacle.
It’s called the People’s Test in South Australia and bumper crowds are expected for what many are calling the biggest game in the World Test Champions’ recent history, considering what transpired in Perth.
When the calendar for the India series was ‘curated’, it was almost a given that Australia would arrive in the City of Churches from the west with a 1-0 lead.

And post their exertions of the pink-ball game in Adelaide, a fixture they have never lost in seven previous attempts, any other suggestion apart from a 2-0 lead would have prompted the question, “Can I have a puff of what you’re smoking?”
Why that barb?
Because Australia are masters of the pink ball game. Of the 22 Tests that have been staged in its D/N avatar, Australia have featured in 12, all at home, and have lost only once to the West Indies at the Gabba.
India, on the contrary, have played just four pink ball games, winning three (Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Bengaluru) and losing one.
Yeah, THAT 36 one. Right here. Saturday, December 19, 2020.
4,9,2,0,4,0,8,4,0,4,1.
No, that isn’t a cheat code. It was what every Indian batter contributed in the second innings as every false shot or mistake eerily produced a nick and every nick was pouched. And it happened in glorious batting conditions with the sun shining in all its glory.
That’s what the pink ball creates. It allows doubts and fears to nestle rent free in the minds and hearts of batters. Especially in the twilight zone. The ball behaves differently once the lights come on and the sun starts setting. With the tendency of the ball skidding on, thanks to the added lacquer, batters’ footwork gets tested and any delay in reaction time often triggers his downfall.
Australia have ruled in pink ball Tests because of their extraordinary cartel of pacers.

At Adelaide, where the pitch quickens up after Day One, thanks to the curators leaving an extra bit of grass to allow the lacquer on the ball to stay longer to aid its sighting, the pacers have had it good.
A one hundred and seventy-three wickets taken by pace bowlers have come at a frugal 27.19. Correspondingly, spinners have taken 47 scalps at 39.72 with office Nathan Lyon, who had toiled as a groundsman at Adelaide, taking 28 of them.
While India expertly negotiated the threat of slingy left-armer Mitchell Starc in Perth, with centurion Yashasvi Jaiswal even taunting him by saying, “It’s coming too slow”, they will know that the pink-ball Test in Adelaide is Starc’s domain and poking the bear any further would be a misadventure.
Mercurial and moody, Starc often has outhouse or penthouse figures. But his lengths in Adelaide generally are fuller and he has 39 wickets in seven Tests to show for his efforts. Those scalps have come at an obscene 16.64. A wicket for him happens every 35.5 balls here, 13 balls fewer than his career strike rate of 48.8.
Apart from Starc’s potency, what will also draw India’s attention is the catching. On Day Two, in the 2020 Adelaide Test, a triple digit lead seemed a certainty, but routine drops from Bumrah, Mayank Agarwal and Prithvi Shaw, possibly the result of not sighting the ball properly, saw it reduced to 53 as the last three wickets added 80.
Bumrah, a brutal self-appraiser, would also know that he and Umesh Yadav bowled a metre short in their first spells four years ago, allowing the openers a few sighters. Now, far more mature and scheming, expect him to course correct and also mentor his younger colleagues to target the stumps. That’s where the wickets will come, especially against an Australian Top Four that seems chronically out-of-form and in awe of India’s bowling talisman.