No Steve Smith. No David Warner. No Cameron Bancroft. Australia were dealt – or they dealt themselves – a heavy blow earlier this year, and they are still trying to come to terms with it.
Does that make India favourites to beat Australia in Australia in a Test series for the first time? Yes, absolutely. But this game of ‘favourites and underdogs’ is just played on paper. Many of us felt India were favourites to beat England in England earlier this year – didn’t quite happen, did it?
Have Australia done well to deal with the absence of Smith-Warner-Bancroft (and Darren Lehmann too, it mustn’t be forgotten)? Yes, they have.
Any team without their two best batsmen will be hamstrung – think the West Indies in the 1970s and 1980s without Viv Richards and Gordon Greenidge, or India in the 2000s without Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid. So Australia are hamstrung. Especially against a team that has Kohli, who doesn’t seem to let conditions – familiar or otherwise – faze him.
But it’s home for them, and they certainly have the bowlers to keep India honest. From the outside, it does look heavily loaded in favour of the visitors, but it’s what happens inside that matters. When it comes to that, the hurting Australians will be sure to concede not an inch, much as the Indians feel it’s theirs.
Dean Jones summed it up well the other day, conceding that India are ‘miles better’ than Australia, and that “if India don’t win this series, they will never win in Australia”. That’s too big a prediction, but it seems pretty fair.
