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The scoreboard showed 74 for 3, with Australia needing a further 114 to take a 2-0 lead in the four-match series. As long as Steve Smith was out there, hope would float. But Umesh Yadav, who would turn out to be the best pace bowler on view in the series, had other ideas. He angled one in at Smith’s legs, and the variable bounce did the rest. As soon as the ball thudded into his pad, Smith must have known that his number was up. In despair, he stared at Peter Handscomb at the non-striker’s end. Would a review save him? As the two batsmen deliberated, they also made the mistake of looking in the direction of the dressing room.
Not a smart idea. Virat Kohli, India’s captain, was already on edge, with his desire to level the series further stoked by his controversial dismissal in the second innings. If he wasn’t going to influence the match with the bat, he certainly wasn’t going to let his counterpart get away with flouting accepted protocols. At the press conference a few hours later, not long after India had wrapped up a famous 75-run win, Kohli was still seething about Smith’s “brain fade.” “There are lines you don’t cross on the cricket field,” he said. “I don’t want to mention the word, but it falls under that bracket.”
When an Australian journalist asked if he meant the word “cheat”, Kohli replied: “I didn’t say that, you did.” Smith would go on to score 499 runs in the series, while Kohli tallied a miserable 46 from five innings before missing the final Test with a shoulder injury. But unlike the much-hyped-but-damp-squib Ashes, India-Australia truly was a heavyweight contest to savour.
The Pune loss to Australia — Smith, predictably, made a century — was India’s only one of the calendar year, as they won seven Tests to stretch their lead atop the rankings. They had the most ODI wins too, but suffered the mortification of having their thunder stolen by their noisy neighbors. Few gave Pakistan a chance going into June’s Champions Trophy, even less so once India dished out a real thumping in the opening game.
But when they’re hot, Pakistan can scorch the turf. And they duly did, seeing off South Africa and Sri Lanka to make the semifinal. Sri Lanka, once a fixture in the final stages of major competitions, upset the highly fancied Indians at The Oval, but then dropped some ridiculously easy catches to wave Pakistan into the final four.
Once there, they brushed England aside, with Hasan Ali, the new Punjabi fast-bowling sensation, taking a third successive three-wicket haul. With India breezing past Bangladesh in the other semi, the final that the ICC dreams of each time they draw up a tournament schedule was a reality.
India had won a World Cup quarterfinal (1996) and semifinal (2011), with the World Twenty20 triumph (2007) sandwiched between them. But more than two decades of bragging rights in the most intense of rivalries came to an end in what turned out to the polar opposite of their group-stage encounter. This time, Pakistan piled up the huge total. Fakhar Zaman, bowled off a Jasprit Bumrah no-ball early on, cashed in with some breathtaking strokeplay, and his teammates batted sensibly around him. R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja, so instrumental in India winning the trophy four years earlier, could exert no influence, and there was cautious optimism in the green-and-white ranks at halfway.
That gave way to euphoria as Mohammed Amir winkled out India’s top three in no time. The key wicket was of course Kohli, chaser extraordinaire. Ali’s bustling pace mopped things up, even as Hardik Pandya blazed away in a bid to save some face. But after years of being at the wrong end of cruel barbs, this was one midsummer night’s dream Pakistanis would never forget.
On the subject of dusks, the gorgeous Adelaide Oval showed once again why day-night Test cricket is here to stay. Australia won, again, to tighten their grip on the Ashes, but the real headlines were made by the fans. As many as 199,147 made their way through the turnstiles to watch the pink-ball spectacle, a record aggregate for a venue that has hosted Tests for 133 years.
In a year when the long-mooted Test championship was finally given shape and form, both Adelaide and Bangalore, as well as the Champions Trophy final watched by hundreds of millions, brought home the importance of both context and contest. For supporters to part with their hard-earned money, you need rivalries that appeal to their primal emotions. In the absence of such a historical divide, you need the sort of edge-of-seat contest that India and Australia provided.
Test cricket may no longer enjoy the primacy that administrators love to talk about, but the Ashes crowds and those fans that created a Colosseum-like atmosphere on the final day in Bangalore certainly didn’t think they were watching a form of the game on its death bed. If you give them something worth watching, they’ll turn up. It’s just that no one wants to see painting by numbers.