Australia v India Fourth Test, Day Four Report Card

Featuring an absence of earthquakes, Slimer, lucky scores, War Games declarations and mix-wrinkles

An Absence of Earthquakes
Grade: B+

The fourth day of this fantastic Test was more or less bookended by Pat Cummins trying to review an already reviewed catch and Jasprit Bumrah taking a five wicket haul via KL Rahul’s knees that was overturned for a no ball. Just two great fast bowlers at the top of their comedy cricket game.

Let’s start with the first one, slaves as we are to the arrow of time.

Australia needed one more wicket to wrap up India’s first innings, and Cummins thought he’d finally found that wicket when Mohammed Siraj squeezed a fuller ball to slip.

The umpires, however, sent it upstairs to check whether it had been a bump ball. It was incredibly close - the ball, bat and ground all intersecting in a flurry of motion (well, two of them were in motion - there was no earthquake taking place as far as I could tell).

Very tight. Time, then, for some super slo-mo, frame-by-frame examina—

No, here’s third umpire Sharfuddoula jackhammering the ‘not out’ button like a foul-mouthed eleven-year-old playing Mortal Kombat. A frazzled Cummins immediately trotted over to the onfield umpires, making the T sign, as if to say ‘well, can we at least ask him to look at it properly?’

“Never!” cackled the umpires. And so Nathan Lyon dismissed Nitish Kumar Reddy three balls later instead.

Slimer
Grade: C

A lead of 105 on the first innings gave Australia the opportunity to bat a couple of increasingly frenetic sessions and set India 350ish on the final day.

Which they kinda eventually did, but not in the way they’d planned. Instead, they drew on all their training from their suicidal third innings batting in the previous Test and did their very best to replicate that.

Sam Konstas was out first, inexplicably not scooping Jasprit Bumrah for six, and instead bowled from one that jagged back in. Usman Khawaja, exhausted by the prospect of having to consider taking a run from every ball Konstas faced, was similarly castled by Siraj.

But then, after lunch, Bumrah returned, once again devouring superlatives like a gluttonous monster (eg Slimer the ghost from Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters II, Ghostbusters (2016) and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire). After Siraj had Steve Smith caught behind trying to accelerate the scoring, Bumrah, now somehow bowling approximately 80% of India’s overs, nom-nom-nommed his way through Travis Head, Mitchell Marsh and Alex Carey to reduce Australia to 6/91, a lead of 196. This cruel, cruel ectoplasmic spectre was going to ruin wee Sammy Konstas’s first Test.

With all normal praise for Bumrah’s bowling seemingly exhausted - this may, after all, be the greatest individual series performance I’ve ever seen from a cricketer, and it’s preposterous that Australia are somehow in the contest against him - Ravi Shastri ventured into less-normal areas.

‘He’s literally making the ball talk,’ claimed Shastri, highlighting Bumrah’s previously underreported ventriloquism prowess.

Bumrah’s voice-throwing is no doubt helped by the hyperextension of his larynx, something that I assume Shastri also attempted to explain via Fox’s new toy, the FoX-Ray, which uses stick figures to explain how bowling works.

I dunno, I wasn’t paying attention. I was mostly just thinking about how badly I wanted them to combine FoX-Ray with Fox Halo so I could see the skeleton of an angel.

Lucky Scores
Grade: B-

At 6/91, however, Pat Cummins joined Marnus Labuschagne in the middle. He’d similarly joined Glenn Maxwell in the middle at 7/91 in the famous World Cup ODI against Afghanistan, so this is clearly his lucky score.

Cummins donned the ol’ S cape yet again, and he and Labuschagne - who’d managed to locate the opposition-infuriating luck that’s so crucial to his best batting - added 57 much needed runs of sanity before Siraj trapped Labuschagne in front.

By the time Cummins was also dismissed, shortly after Mitchell Starc had fallen just short of a well-run three, oblivious to his captain holding up an ‘it’s just a single, actually, Mitch’ arm, Australia were 9/173, 278 ahead, with about an hour to play, and the match perfectly poised.

But this silly, magnificent day of cricket had still more nonsense to play out…

War Games Declarations
Grade: A-