In the end, the dice landed the right way up for the shooter. Had India managed to bat for another hour, another 14 overs, Australia’s tactics would have been sliced up; too conservative in batting into the final day. But Australia’s gamble was about laying off risk on the other half of the equation, all but eliminating India’s chance of a win at the cost of reducing their own. In the end, this time, it worked, when Nathan Lyon snagged the 10th wicket just before 5.30pm Melbourne time; Australia bowling India out for 155 and winning the fourth Test by 184 runs to lead 2-1 before the series ends in Sydney.
It was, in the end, a close-run thing, a reminder that you’re often only vindicated in the sporting business if you happen to guess right. Lyon’s 10th-wicket partnership with Scott Boland in the third innings ended up being 61, adding only six of those after resuming on the fifth morning, and costing Australia four overs to do it. That final extension may not have worked out, but the previous evening’s runs made a major psychological difference, taking India’s target from a high-200s score, one that would have felt possible, to 340, that didn’t.
India’s captain, Rohit Sharma, said his side headed out with the idea of attempting the chase, but that didn’t manifest often or for long. The early exchanges made it all but impossible, Rohit’s job with Yashasvi Jaiswal becoming one of pure survival. As with India’s bowlers the previous day, the new ball produced lavish movement that somehow never took a healthy enough edge. Jaiswal was beaten like an omelette but stayed at the plate.
The first 16 overs produced 25 runs, before Pat Cummins in one over nabbed Rohit’s leading edge to gully and the shoulder of KL Rahul’s bat to first slip. Virat Kohli dropped into the same pattern of blocking, at least for his first 28 balls. Inexplicably, six balls from lunch, he launched a cover heave with no foot movement and an angled bat, edged to slip as well.
So it was down to Jaiswal and Rishabh Pant, the firework merchants in this Indian side, only this time they doused the fuses. For a moment it looked as if the show was on, with four boundaries from Boland and one from Mitchell Starc in three overs. The target was coming down towards 250 with a couple of sessions in hand. But just as quickly it was done, Pant retreating to a dead-bat approach aside from the occasional single, as the pair batted through the session.
The crowd was immense, almost 75,000 coming in to obliterate the MCG’s record for the final day of a Test, while taking the five-day total to 373,691. Not many of those in on the last day were expecting anything but a draw after four overs of the final session. But who knows what goes through the mind of Pant? After 30 from 103 balls, he could no longer restrain himself when the 104th came down from Travis Head’s part-time spin. Aiming over midwicket for the Olympic Stand, he fell short into Mitchell Marsh’s hands.
That opened the sluice, and the flow began. You can look at Lyon, who spun one on to the edge of the first-innings century-maker Nitish Kumar Reddy, and later sealed the deal against the hapless Mohammed Siraj. You can talk about Cummins, whose bouncer was still sufficiently sharp to get through Jaiswal on 84, a clear deflection on the replay though India’s supporters were unhappy about the lack of movement on the soundwave graph.
The spirit of the day, though, rested with Boland. The MCG specialist, the man who will have a statue here one day if the local crowd get their way. Through most of his career, Boland received little from the MCG, toiling to the crease and slamming hundreds of cricket balls into its unresponsive surface. Then in the 2021 Ashes Test it repaid him in spades, and has come to life since.
In this match it had no problems with low bounce, but offered genuine kick for some deliveries. Before Reddy’s dismissal, Boland had one leap at Ravindra Jadeja, flummoxed and fending and nicking. After Jaiswal’s, he used his bounce to take Akash Deep at short leg, then to force Jasprit Bumrah into an edge. There would be no clinging on near the end, as Boland himself had done with the bat. He brought the end too close, too soon. He had faced 74 deliveries in the third innings; India’s bottom four faced 72 in the fourth.
So something ends, even before the final stanza. India may yet keep the trophy at 2-2 if they can rebound from disappointment, but their sequence of winning series in Australia is over. Now we are in the territory of retaining trophies, of honours shared. Their hopes of making the World Test Championship final also rest on winning in Sydney. There is still much to play for, and often enough, the result comes down to an educated guess.
