Cummins gains the edge over Pujara's broad bat

Australia's vaunted Test bowling attack might have been excused from visibly wincing at the prospect of India's batting behemoth Cheteshwar Pujara returning to their patch this summer.

Pujara was player of the series, as well as the singular biggest difference in his team's historic first Test series win on Australia soil two years ago, when he withstood more than 200 overs in scoring 521 runs at an average of more than 74 each time he went to the wicket.

The sight of the unflappable, undemonstrative batting devotee routinely letting balls pass, defending obdurately, rarely lapsing into error became burned into the memories of Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon who collectively bowled 678 of the 731 overs Australia were forced to bowl in that four-match campaign.

So to have seen Pujara come and go five times in the two-and-a-half Tests of this Vodafone Series to date for a return of 113 runs (average 22.60) is almost as pleasing to the quartet as the fact they've only had to deliver 418 balls at his hauntingly broad bat.

And crucial to that marked shift in influence is Cummins, who has dismissed Pujara four times in the space of 129 deliveries across five India innings at a personal cost of just 19 runs.

On top of his teammates' capacity to completely quell Pujara's scoring has been Cummins' uncanny knack of finding the edge of that previously unerring bat, as was the case again today when – having reached 50 for the first time in the series – Pujara was promptly caught behind the wicket.

"That one today got a bit of assistance from the pitch, it seemed to jump up a bit," Cummins said of the dismissal that was crucial in bowling out India for 244 as Australia stretched their lead to 197 with eight wickets in hand at the close of day three.

"He's someone you know you're going to have to bowl a lot at, and I think we got our heads around that this series.

"For him to score runs, we were going to make it hard as possible.

"And whether he bats for 200, 300 balls, we'll just try and bowl good ball after good ball, challenge both sides of his bat, and fortunately so far it's worked."

It's a plan that sounds brilliant in its simplicity, but devilishly difficult to implement across 22 yards with cricket ball in hand against such an accomplished foe.

But so ruthlessly parsimonious have been Cummins and his cohorts, Pujara has found the boundary just eight times in his five innings to date (compared to 50 fours and a pair of sixes in 2018-19), with Australia's vice-captain conceding only two of them in the almost 22 overs he's bowled at Pujara so far.

Even more remarkably, those 129 Cummins' deliveries have yielded just 10 scoring shots from India's premier batter (now that skipper Virat Kohli has returned home on paternity leave) which means 119 of them – 92 per cent – have been dots.

The spell cast by Cummins has also seen Pujara paralysed in the face of bowling from the others in Australia's attack, as became brutally obvious at the SCG yesterday and today.

On a pitch that is beginning to show variable bounce against the best all-round Test attack in the world, the 32-year-old all-but abandoned any ambition to score in preference for pure survival.

He managed 16 runs from the first 100 deliveries he faced, before striking two boundaries in the space of three balls from Lyon's bowling.

However, new-normal transmission was soon resumed as Pujara's partner Rishabh Pant took over the run-making role while the senior batter ground his way to a half-century from 174 balls, the slowest such milestone in his 10-year, 79-Test career.

His previous longest labour to reach 50 was his 173-ball effort against South Africa at Wanderers three years ago when he – as was the case today – lost his wicket immediately after celebrating the occasion.

In fairness, today's half-century was not demonstrably more drawn out than when he was dominant against Australia's same four front-line bowlers two summers ago.

In scoring hundreds at Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney in that historic series, Pujara respectively took 153, 152 and 134 balls to post his first 50 at those venues.

However, the glaring change from that campaign is that once Pujara became set at the crease on pitches that offered significantly less to bowlers than the three surfaces encountered to date in this series, he was impossible to shift until fortune or fatigue intervened.

Certainly Cummins and his fellow quicks haven't come to fear the sight of Pujara at the other end as they did in 2018-19 when they were forced to complete 20 or 30 or more overs per innings because they simply couldn't get the bloke out.

"You know he's going to hang around but as long as you're controlling the scoreboard (it's not so bad)," Cummins said today after finishing with 4-29 from 21.4 overs.

"I think at one stage he'd been out there for 200 balls or 150 balls, and I remember looking up at the scoreboard and thinking, 'Oh they're still 200-odd runs away from our first-innings total' so that felt a long way away.

"We continued to bowl well and set tight fields, so not overly bothered (about Pujara's ongoing occupation).

"I think having 'Greeny' (rookie allrounder Cameron Green) in there as well as another bowling option helps take the load off us quicks, so we're not having those big 20-odd over days."

Cummins' miserly economy rate of 1.34 runs per over from today represented the most economical innings effort of 20 overs or more from an Australia pace bowler on home turf since Glenn McGrath's 2-29 (at 1.16) off 25 overs against the West Indies at Hobart 15 years ago.

It was a fitting achievement given it came on Jane McGrath Day at the SCG, which saw more money raised to fund breast care nurses around Australia ($2.29 million) than the 12 previous iterations of the event despite the restrictions on crowd numbers due to the COVID19 pandemic.

It also led Cummins, already the number-one ranked Test bowler in the world, to muse that he might just be in the form of his already stellar career.

"It's right up there," he said of his current form vein that has netted him 14 wickets at an average of 14.28 and a strike-rate of a wicket every seven overs in the series to date.

"Rhythm feels really good and it feels like I've got pretty good control over not only where the ball's landing, but the seam movement as well.

"I feel like I can nip it in and out a bit more than I have in the past.

"Coming into the series quite fresh as well, not having played Tests since last summer, that's a massive help. Even three Tests in, the legs feel really fresh, so don't discount that either."

Vodafone Test Series v India 2020-21

Australia Test squad: Tim Paine (c), Sean Abbott, Pat Cummins, Cameron Green, Marcus Harris, Josh Hazlewood, Travis Head, Moises Henriques, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Michael Neser, James Pattinson, Will Pucovski, Steve Smith, Mitchell Starc, Mitchell Swepson, Matthew Wade, David Warner

India Test squad: Ajinkya Rahane (captain), Rohit Sharma (vice-captain), Mayank Agarwal, Prithvi Shaw, Cheteshwar Pujara, Hanuma Vihari, Shubman Gill, Wriddhiman Saha (wk), Rishabh Pant (wk), Jasprit Bumrah, Navdeep Saini, Kuldeep Yadav, Ravindra Jadeja, R Ashwin, Mohammed Siraj, Shardul Thakur, Thangarasu Natarajan

First Test: Australia won by eight wickets

Second Test: India won by eight wickets

Third Test: January 7-11, SCG, 10.30am AEDT

Fourth Test: January 15-19, Gabba, 11am AEDT