Sydney: The mindset, tactics and strategies that Australia will employ in the four-Test tour of India in February-March, have been revealed in a documentary series as the Pat Cummins’ side hopes to break their 19-year series-losing streak in India.
The docu-series called ‘The Test’ season two, which premieres on Amazon’s Prime Video this week, follows the highs and lows of Pat Cummins’ team from the time of his appointment as skipper just weeks before last summer’s Ashes campaign, through to their subsequent tours of Pakistan and Sri Lanka, according to a report in the Australian media on Wednesday. Amazon Original’s ‘The Test’ season two premieres on Prime Video this week.
Australia are scheduled to tour India in February-March for four Tests and three ODIs.
Australia will leave for India in early February. The first Test will be played at Nagpur from February 9-13, and the second at New Delhi from Feb 17-21. The Test will be played at Dharamshala from March 1-5 while the fourth will be held at Ahmedabad from March 9-13. The three-match ODI series will start on March 17 at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai.
“The four-episode documentary provides some revealing insights into the myriad characters that make up the current team, including Cummins’ passion for books, spinner Nathan Lyon’s ambition to master Auslan sign language and even Marnus Labuschagne’s curious culinary predilection.”
According to the series, Australia’s blueprint for the Tests in India is to keep constantly chipping away, retaining faith their plans would work until finally, a crack appeared in the opposition.
The tactics had proved successful in Pakistan as Australia won the three-match series 1-0 after the first two games were deadlocked on flat pitches. The blueprint had also worked in the first Test of their drawn 1-1 series in Sri Lanka.
Though the pitches in India are expected to be more spin-friendly, Australia is going ahead with the same tactics hoping that it will help them conquer the country that was once described as the Test team’s final frontier by ex-skipper Steve Waugh while former coach Justin Langer labelled it ‘Everest’ when he took over the job in 2018.
Steve Waugh’s side failed to conquer the Final Frontier in 2001 but Australia finally won a Test series in India in 2004 under Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting. Since then, they have encountered more setbacks in India.
Cummins said in the wake of Australia’s 2-0 win over South Africa in the recently concluded series, he believed his team covers all contingencies likely to be faced on the subcontinent, and hold as good a chance as any of his predecessors of regaining the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, according to a report in cricket.com.au.
Cummins cites the examples of the teams of the 1990s and early 2000s in which Waugh and Langer were regular members that conquered every challenge as the benchmark his men aim to reach.
“They won in India, they won in England,” Cummins says in ‘The Test’, noting Australia follow their India assignment with a five-Test Ashes tour to the UK in June and July. That Test team, no matter where they (went) in the world, they could adapt. That’s the gold standard. That’s what you aspire to,” he was quoted as saying in the report.
One of the keys to taking their successful record at home, where they have not been defeated in a Test for two summers, to the subcontinent (where before the Pakistan success they won just two series from eight attempts stretching back to 2006) is shelving the approach that works here.
–IANS