Much has been spoken about the pitch and spin-friendly conditions in India. While the assumption is that the toss more or less decides the fate of Test matches in India, Tim Southee and Kyle Jamieson on Thursday showed there are ways to get around benign conditions for seam bowling.
Everything that the Green Park pitch offered on Thursday was meant to drive a dagger through the hearts of pacers. The new ball looped and barely reached wicketkeeper Tom Blundell. Things looked so dire in the third over that a genuine edge off Mayank Agarwal’s bat landed a couple of feet ahead of Blundell.
Left-arm spinner Ajaz Patel, bowling the seventh over of the match, saw a short ball reach the shin of Shubman Gill. Yet, Southee and Jamieson bowled to prove they were not just out in the park to do a holding job before the spinners. Anyway, they have given a presentation on making most out of nothing.
They still had a ball with a pronounced seam and a pitch so bare that it would scuff up the ball by the 30th over to extract reverse swing. Before that, Jamieson had eventually got Agarwal to nick off to Blundell in the eighth over. All four Indian wickets fell to the seam of Southee and Jamieson.
“Lucky to get some movement early on. Little bit of reverse in the middle. We do know the nature of the pitch (here), they do tend to break up,” was Jamieson’s response after finishing with 3/47.
“Sometimes, it’s difficult to start knowing when it’s reverse-swinging and especially after coming back from lunch, I didn’t expect the ball to reverse that early in the game,” Gill said, having lost his stumps to Jamieson immediately after lunch.
“That’s the thing about Test cricket, you have to read the conditions fast. In this particular innings, I wasn’t able to read that ball well and generally, I wasn’t expecting the ball to reverse,” Gill said.
Not just Gill. Cheteshwar Pujara, playing his 91st Test, was all at sea against the mastery of Southee in the second session. On a pitch that offered no lateral movement, Southee relied on swing to expose Pujara’s defence.
By dismissing Pujara caught behind in the same way he has been getting out in Australia and England, Southee showed how good this New Zealand team is at adapting to condition.
