Cricket Column: Kohli looks to twist the knife at Indore

After the defeat at Kolkata that left the visitors 2-0 down in the five-match ODI series, Australian skipper Steve Smith had his finger on the right spot of Australian trouble, that they “have had a lot of collapses”. His confession, that “it’s a hard one to put his finger on” and get things right, is something that we seldom got to hear from the Australians in the past.
Smith need to find a way to change what he and his players were doing “because it’s not working”, but he doesn’t seem to know how to do that. The spell of confusion they are under was omnipresent in both the games. In the first, faced with a target of 164 in 21 overs, they panicked, showing unnecessary urgency as if hitting every ball to the boundary was the only way to gather 164 runs in 21 overs. It was funny to see a team getting into such a mindset in the T20 age when totals in excess of 200 are chased by teams without consternation.
The target at Kolkata was 253, and this time the smallness of the total got the Australians into confusion. Smith thinks some of the players watched, or tried to watch, the ball too closely and forgot to play the game. While he may be right in part, what did the visitors in was a bit more than what he had spelled out. It was a case of tactics going wrong as well as attitude and mindset getting mixed up.
The Australian game plan at Chennai focused on bowling full and wide outside off-stump with a packed off-side field, and Ajinkya Rahane and Virat Kohli fell for the trap as they drove, edged and perished. The other strategy, bowling short and wide outside off-stump and making batsmen drag the ball awkwardly to the onside, got the better of Rohit Sharma and Kedar Jadhav as they failed to get the pulls right.
Such plans were perfect in the first game but did not come good in the second. The top-scorers at Kolkata were Rahane and Kohli. If the Australians managed to send them back to the dressing room earlier than they did, India would have struggled more than they actually did on a difficult pitch to play the shots. That was a perfect case of how two top players righted their past wrongs on a not-so-friendly pitch.
Still, despite the holes in the bowling strategy, Australian fast bowlers got the Indians out for 252 at Kolkata and reduced the hosts to 87 for 5 at Chennai. Unfortunately for the visitors, they could not translate the early gains in the first match, or the overall impact in the second, to their advantage.
At Chennai, Smith missed the service of a lethal strike bowler like Mitchell Starc who could have stopped guys like Bhuvaneshwar Kumar from doing the damage with bat to leave MS Dhoni with fewer options than he actually had. If the lower order started to fold quickly, Dhoni would have got run out of partners or been forced to take risk and perish.
At Kolkata, Smith did not have batsmen who converted their starts into match-winning scores. At the end of the 15th over Australia were just two down, with a healthy 76 runs on the board. The target was 177 runs away, and Travis Head and Smith looked settled, having scored more than 30 runs each. If the partnership lasted 10 more overs, or if one of them played longer than they did, the distance would have come closer for the visitors and that would have put pressure on the Indians.
Instead, Head departed in the 16th over for 39, and Smith in the 30th for 59, and both were out to poor shot selection than the merit of the ball they got to play. Head went for a full toss and Smith tried a pull off a short ball, and, in between Glenn Maxwell, after hitting two sixes in a row off the third and fourth ball he faced, perished for 14 as he charged down at Yuzvendra Chahal and missed, leaving Australia reeling at 138 for five. That was the perfect setting for Kuldeep Yadav to come back and claim his hat-trick.
Smith’s admission of helplessness about the way forward to stop collapses reveals the depth of vulnerability the visitors have sunk into. Kohli is ruthless. We got to witness again that side of the player in Kolkatta after he took a single off a Matthew Wade misfiled. Uncalled-for efforts made by Wade and Marcus Stoinis to make him guilty of taking a bye were brutally and rightly dismissed by the Indian captain. Wade failed to gather the ball and seemed to have injured his arm in the process, but he was not hit on the head or lying unconscious on the ground to make Kohli deal with the situation any differently than he did.
Down, demoralised and nearly out — that’s how Australia are at the moment. That’s an opportunity and motivation for Kohli to twist the knife.
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The writer is a freelance contributor based in India. All the views and opinions expressed in the article are solely those of the author and do not reflect those of Times of Oman