Lefties got it all right

Daniel Laidlaw

They had the experience. The Australian batting line-up, without a young player to be found, was nothing if not experienced enough to bat well on a turning pitch. The Waugh brothers, with more than 240 Tests between, had been there before. Ricky Ponting, even at 26, was familiar with the ball leaping and bouncing. Langer, too, has 38 Tests behind him and a couple of trips to the subcontinent. Yet, despite the accumulated knowledge of these players, it was Australia’s two most inexperienced batsmen, Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist, who brought the tourists back from the edge of the precipice with a partnership of stunning audacity after a capitulation against spin by the more veteran team members.

Far from being callow rookies at at 29 years of age, Hayden and Gilchrist had nonetheless never batted in a Test match in India, or even on similar surfaces in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. With the middle order having been brought undone by the wiles of Harbhajan, this left-handed pairing might have been expected to follow suit. But rather than just dig in against clever bowling made to look unplayable, this pair launched one of the most courageous and confident counter-offensives imaginable when it appeared India was going to bowl itself into the dominant position.

Gilchrist, for all his strokemaking prowess and reputation, had never played a Test outside the Antipodes and would not have confronted a wicket with quite as much sharp turn so early. The writing was on the wall at 5/99 but he and Hayden refused to bow to the storyline and instead created one of their own.

Matthew Hayden is virtually the forgotten man of the Australian team. With patchy form leading up to the series and a poor Test record, he was not considered to be a leading protagonist in the series drama. But this solidly-built opener, a first-class run machine, had to make his mark in international cricket soon or risk once again being rotated out of Australia's revolving opening slot. Having to face spin early on unfamiliar wickets, conditions were not expected to be favourable to Hayden having a successful series. Yet most Australian batsmen stand up to make a telling contribution at some point in a series, and it was unquestionably Hayden’s turn to do so. Production from the openers, namely Hayden, had tailed off towards the end of the home season and coach John Buchanan had marked the top order as an area that had to lift in India.

Hayden rose to the challenge with his best Test innings to date, took risks when appropriate, and with Gilchrist ultimately succeeded. Against Harbhajan, the lefties appeared to have a simple early method: Leave as much as possible, block the ones full and on the stumps, and sweep everything else with abandon. It was too much for Justin Langer, who succumbed to the inevitable, but Hayden had a start and became increasingly successful with the sweep the more he employed it.

Playing the sweep regularly against the ball turning away so much carried a high degree of risk and for much of the first session it reeked of a hit-and-hope attitude. Many miscues landed fortuitously but there seemed no other avenue to score and so it was played almost exclusively.

Despite having the Aussies five down, Sourav Ganguly clearly did not have faith in Rahul Sanghvi turning the ball in to the left-handers so called on Tendulkar instead to support Harbhajan. At that point, he probably wished he had Hirwani or, more wistfully, Kumble. The less accurate Tendulkar gave the batsmen an opening, first allowing a few boundaries to mid wicket as the batsmen’s confidence grew in the sweep shot before seeing the fours turn into a flood as they risked the same method against Harbhajan and Sanghvi once more. From there, it became an all-out assault of awesome brutality.

As the sweep shots grew more thunderous so too the range of strokes increased along with the confidence to play defensively. Gilchrist, having taken some time to get a feel for the bowling, soon changed the momentum with his keen eye. This mad, out-of-control assault may just have been the sanest way to get a lost innings back on track.

Initially it wasn’t pretty, or controlled, but plundering the bowling was about the only method of survival at that point. It is already noticeable in two days that once batsmen get a foothold on this pitch, batting appears a different game and runs flow rapidly across the fast outfield. So it was for Gilchrist and Hayden, as the ball came off the middle, bottom edge and the top edge, frequently falling just short of or lobbing away from fielders, but most of the time flying to the fence regardless. The risk of getting out by playing this way was ever-present, but no more so than batting doggedly for survival.

Gilchrist's impact on the Australian team is immeasurable. He has the admirable quality of producing his best when his side needs it most and in the process transforms matches, displaying the merits of attacking the bowling. Gilchrist bats heedless of the match situation and seems a law unto himself at the crease. As much as the earlier Aussie batsman had no answer to Harbhajan, so the off-spinner was powerless to stop Gilchrist’s pummelling. For others, sweeping against the spin was a risky proposition. For Gilchrist, it was the best way to plunder boundaries and the regulation with which he did it could scarcely have been thought possible.

India effectively lost the match in an hour of Gilchrist-induced post-lunch mayhem that left the hosts totally bereft of answers to the onslaught. In one hour, Gilchrist and Hayden flayed 96 from 13 overs. Hayden had been at the crease for 138 minutes before Gilchrist came to the middle. At lunch, Hayden was 80 and Gilchrist 36. Yet Gilchrist reached his century first at the end of that surreal hour, from a mere 84 balls, in what must rate as one of the most memorable innings witnessed in recent years given the state of the match.

Although India eventually stemmed the bleeding, the white flag had seemingly been waved. It is one thing to take control of a match with an inspired spell and lead from the front. But it is another to raise your game once the opposition has changed the momentum, which to date has been the difference between the two sides. Mired on 5/99 against a pumped up Indian team, Gilchrist and Hayden steadied before taking risks in launching a counter-offensive. Challenged by this, the Indians collectively failed to regroup at lunch and proceeded to lose all composure as Gilchrist took the match away. Perhaps the approach of Hayden and more particularly Gilchrist will be a lesson to all concerned about how quickly a match can change when the initiative is seized.

Mail Daniel Laidlaw