Australia stuck in a boom-or-bust bubble

Ranchi: imagination, this was a balmy Indian summer's day. The sun shone in all its splendour, baking the pitch to a medium to well-done shade of steak brown. The kind on which batsmen of all shapes, sizes and stature could enjoy a little 20-over swingabout.

 It was not.

t was overcast in Ranchi through the game and had been for two days in the build up to the game. The surface had spent a significant time under the multiple layers of sheets and upon exposure to the outside world, seemed slightly underdone. It was going to be sluggish, may be even two paced. The bounce was going to be uneven and spin was going to play a part. Even for a T20 game, the conditions demanded vigilance. A tour of India, with sinister spinners always lurking in the background at all times, always does. Except, Australia weren't willing to admit it.

 "Caution is for softies. We are Australia. We counter-attack."

he side's best batsman on the tour so far. He raced away to 29 off 18 in Australia's PowerPlay score of 49 for 1. This was just before Yuzvendra Chahal came along and immediately turned his leg break. Hardik Pandya, India's fifth bowler - and they were playing exactly five frontline bowlers - had gone for 23 in his first two and struggled to adjust to his lengths. Here was a chance to consolidate and kick-on after another mini assessment of position.

But on the tour, Australia have found ruing batting collapses easier than finding ways to address them. In Chennai they lost 4 for 35. In Kolkata 5 for 42. Indore 5 for 51. Nagpur 5 for 37. Even in an abridged 20-over format of the game, they found a way to lose 7 for 59 before even the clouds bottling up all the moisture had had enough of the atrocity.

This latest collapse cannot be put down to naivety, or an extraordinary bowling display. It was a sheer refusal to accept that a more resourceful approach was available. This is quickly becoming a batting side that is incapable of thinking on its feet, or adjusting the tempo to suit the pitch conditions.

"It would have been nice to have Steven Smith's skill out there but also his game smarts in these conditions," said Aaron Finch after the game. Australia's opener incidentally had done well to rein in his own game and yet score at a strike-rate of 140. He stood still, and allowed the ball to come to him as opposed to his other colleagues, who went on a wild goose chase with the ball. That way, even when he was deceived by the slowness of the pitch or the bowler's change-ups, he adjusted to play the chip over the in-field. Once

(2 for 16) was introduced, he curiously opted to play the sweep as opposed to his usual lofts over the 'v' against the spinners. It worked until the rigidity of his plans led him to his downfall.

Having read the batsman's intentions, Kuldeep slipped in an overpitched delivery and caught Finch in a tentative moment. Finch shaped up for the premeditated sweep and then backed out. He ended up neither attacking nor defending and was bowled. His choice of word to describe this moment of indecision was curious by itself and rather common in these India-Australia circles - "brain fade" 

"I thought on that wicket, to Kuldeep, sweeping was a safer option than taking him over the top. Some balls were spinning. It was hard to judge the bounce on a track that was quite difficult," he said. "I found the sweep was the safer option. One to get off strike and to get a boundary as well if I could pick out a gap, but I kept picking out a fielder. The ball that I got out on was a little bit of brain fade, I went to sweep and just tried to chip him on the onside for one, and missed it."

reinstated in the line-up, used either edge of his bat to score two boundaries and then picked out mid-wicket with a rank short-ball to fall to Yuzvendra Chahal for the fourth straight time on the tour. Moises Henriques, with all the IPL experience of playing on sluggish wickets in Hyderabad, charged out to Kuldeep Yadav and inside-edged a low-bouncing delivery to the base of his stump. Travis Head attempted an ungainly whip and offered his leg-stump to Pandya.

 At no time, did any batsman stop, assess the conditions, the possibility of DLS coming to play in a rain-hit game to re-calibrate the estimated total. Instead when the rains came pouring down, Australia's scoreboard read a hapless 118 for 8, with nine deliveries in the innings criminally unused. That proved to be decisive in India having to chase 48 from 6 overs and not 60 or more.

Finch refuted the claim that the batting performance was a debacle and even offered a defence for his team's methods. "It is easy to look back now and say, 'yes [we should have changed our approach'. But when you look at the history of this ground, it suggests that 150 is a par score or the average score batting first on this surface. We wanted to make sure we were up and around that mark. We knew with how competent their bowlers are at the death -- Bhuvneshwar and Bumrah, in particular, are two of the finest going around at executing in the end.

"We felt we had to play a little bit more high-risk game through the middle overs to maximise. Unfortunately we just kept losing wickets. That's a part of T20. There is not a lot of time to be assessing the pitch for 10-12 overs and then making a decision. It has to be a split second, two or three balls. Guys coming in for their first hit in these conditions."

Between the end of the ODI series on October 1 and the first T20I on Saturday, Australia had six days and five new players to hit a mental and tactical reset. The 18.3 overs in Ranchi have offered no indication of a possible redemption.