Australia crush India inside three days to bag Border-Gavaskar Trophy
SYDNEY: Gone in three days. All the attendant hype, all their loyal legions of fans, all the batting superstars and all the swagger couldn’t save India as Australia prised out the Border-Gavaskar Trophy from their fingers for the first time in a decade.
Indian cricket simultaneously hit its lowest point in that 10-year period here on Sunday.

The team’s batting lineup resembled a motley crew of shrill wannabes eager to stake claim and obsolete stalwarts looking to buy time. The bowling reeked of anxious overdependence on Jasprit Bumrah, an all-time great whose body simply gave up at the end of his memorable Australian summer.
Now, there are no second rung of pacers worth the newsprint, no spinners left standing who can claim an automatic berth. The team looks bereft of leadership after Rohit Sharma’s flipflops over his batting position, which eventually cost him his place in the side. To add to the woes, the playing XI picks often bordered on the bizarre.
It’s a wonder India came away with a 1-3 scoreline in some tough batting conditions against one of the strongest Australian pace attacks ever.

They simply lacked the depth to challenge the hosts for sustained periods, a prerequisite to winning a Test match. In a portent of things to come, they came into this series already rattled by the 0-3 whitewash to New Zealand at home, and made things worse for themselves.
On Day Three of the fifth Test, as Travis Head and Beau Webster galloped towards the 162-run target and Prasidh Krishna and Mohammed Siraj kept feeding them easy runs by straying down leg, India’s inadequacies came into sharp focus. They had already over bowled Bumrah to the point of no return in the previous game at the MCG, but failed to pick an extra seamer to support him on the spiciest pitch of all.
India chose an extra spinner instead in Washington Sundar and gave him one over across the two innings. If the idea was to cash in on Sundar’s batting abilities, why not pick one of the specialists already in the squad? Nitish Kumar Reddy was another case in point, just an extra cushion for top-order failures rather than a serious medium-pace option.

The approach across the two innings also raised questions. In the first, India knuckled down for a plod-a-thon, clearly not what this generation of batters is made for. In the second they went to the other extreme, batting as if they had given up all hope of scoring patient runs on this surface. Take out Rishabh Pant’s stodgy 40 in the first innings and pulsating 61 in the second, and there’s little else to speak of.
Though the writing was on the wall, hope still flickered when Sundar and Jadeja resumed the innings on the third day. Instead, India lost four wickets for 16 runs in 7.5 overs as the canny, skillful Pat Cummins and the gloriously persistent Scott Boland – who bagged his first 10-wicket haul – ran through the tail.
Australia’s target still seemed substantial given the inconsistent bounce on the surface.

If only Bumrah had been around. India’s stand-in captain did come out to bat but was nowhere to be seen during the warm-ups. He had been taken for scans after experiencing back spasms on the second day, and given the history of back injuries, thought it best not to bowl. The man of the series finished with 32 wickets at 13.06 but wasn’t available when needed most of all.
When Australia batted, Prasidh and Siraj gave away 26 off the first two overs, 12 of them extras. The first three overs yielded 35 and allowed Usman Khawaja some breathing room. But when Prasidh got a fidgety Steve Smith with some steep bounce just one run shy of the 10,000-run mark, expectation again lingered.
Siraj got rid of Khawaja after lunch but then India ran into old nemesis Travis Head, who held one end firm as Beau Webster shaved quick runs off the target to fashion Australia’s six-wicket win.

Pat Cummins’ men now have another World Test Championship title within sight. While they too must address inevitable questions of transition sometime later this year, that inquisition must wait.
India, on the other hand, will be weighed down by the magnitude of their failure in Australia. No amount of white-ball bashing in docile conditions can erase the consequences of this series defeat.