Australia v India: second Test, day five – live!

Opening the bowling on the email is Adam Hirst. “What was Marcus Harris thinking?” he asks. “He’s clearly not fit for Australian test cricket saying those kind of things. You don’t have to be out to go clubbing! Just get a taxi straight to the ground in the morning like a proper test cricketer from the 1980s would.”

Or an English player, for that matter. All I see here is a window to plug Derek Pringle’s superb new book. Buy it, read it, live it.

Okay, I have to make the lengthy dash from Uber (technically banned at Perth Stadium) to my press box desk. Back with you in about ten minutes.

Nathan Lyon speaks with Channel Seven. He now has 500 First Class wickets. What a remarkable story. To pick one element of it, something I wrote in Bangladesh last year from when he was a curator at Manuka in ‘09/10 and we played at the same Canberra club (Carn Westies!).

The pitch. All told, we probably expected more and deeper cracks by the end given how it played on the opening afternoon. But as we saw with Shami and Bumrah after lunch yesterday, it’s still more than a handful.

Day/night for Perth? WACA boss Christina Matthews has been making the case for the new stadium to host pink-ball Test next summer. We know when Brisbane had one a couple of summers back it began at 1pm local, partly to hit the TV sweet spot. Let’s assume they do the same here, it would see the final session would wrap up on the east coast – after the extra half hour – at 11:30pm. Too late for young eyes?

Marcus Harris is fitting in nicely, isn’t he? Loved this before the final ball yesterday, in an effort to inspire something silly from Rishabh.

Even if you enjoy the niggle between these cricketing giants… you probably wish Monkeygate was behind us forever. Sadly, not quite. As you can read below, a Fox Sports special was on last night going back through the incident with Andrew Symonds, which has kicked things off again. As Dan Brettig said to me on Sunday, the man who documented so much of this in his wonderful book Whitewash to Whitewash: “The first rule of cricket writing is that Monkeygate is never over.”

Adam will be here shortly. In the meantime, catch up on what happened on day four, including this: