Border-Gavaskar Trophy: Bumrah shows how to look Aussies in the eye

Did stand-in skipper Jasprit Bumrah help India bounce back into the game after a somewhat predictable batting collapse at Perth? It’s still too early to tell after the first day’s play, but the smiling assassin has certainly conjured up a lifeline and sent a strong message to his teammates that this Australian team is not unbeatable.

To say that the first day of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy (famous as its awkward acronym BGT now) belonged to pace bowlers would be an understatement. If India had walked into the trap laid by the Old Firm of Cummins-Starc-Hazlewood earlier, Bumrah, like so many times in the past, dealt a body blow to the Australian top order by removing two of their most experienced batters, Usman Khwaja and Steve Smith, in one over.

The Australian scorecard read a dismal 19/3 by the seventh over, with Bumrah claiming all three wickets and his partners-in-crime: Mohammed Siraj and debutant Harshit Rana dealt further blows to now raise hopes of what could be a first innings lead despite scoring 150.

He ended the day with awesome figures of 10-3-17-4, and questions were raised after the day’s play on whether the move to psych the visitors with a bouncy track boomeranged on Australia, exposing their batting frailties as well, despite India lacking the seasoned Mohammed Shami.

If the new-look Indian pace attack has opened up the first Test, it will also go a long way in setting up the tone for the tone for the series. The drop-in pitch at the Optus Stadium was as lively as one would expect and it was the extra bounce which proved to be the undoing for master batter Virat Kohli.

However, it did not have any demons as showed by a sensible 48-run partnership between Rishabh Pant and newcomer Nitish Reddy — with the latter surprising all with his positivity and temperament to end as the highest scorer in the innings. The much maligned K.L. Rahul also stood firm as an opener and used the bowlers’ pace to unleash a few gorgeous cover drives till he fell to a controversial DRS call for caught behind.

Undone by bounce

If Rahul’s dismissal, despite the inconclusive evidence from the TV replays, was a major talking point during the day, so was the terminal decline in Virat Kohli’s form. The master batter, whose return Down Under for possibly the last time for a Test series has been treated with all due hype, paid the price for standing too far forward, a move understandable on English wickets to negate the extra swing but not in Perth. This found him caught unawares at a back-of-the-length delivery from Hazlewood which rose on him, and Alex Carey made no mistake behind the stumps.

Come Saturday, and India’s main agenda should be to knock off Australia’s tail as soon as possible as they have often proved to be thorn in the flesh in the past.