Australia v India: first Test, day one –live!

1st over: India 1-1 (Agarwal 0, Pujara 1) Hoo boy. In the 2018 Test here, Pujara was called to the crease after 12 balls. This time he’s in after two. He bails out of his first delivery from Starc, backing away and citing movement from someone passing behind the massive sightscreen. Finally he settles. Faces up. Defends the first. Then edges short of first slip! Starc with that pace gets the nick but it dies, Pujara’s soft hands and a deep set cordon helping to save him. He gets a run from the spill. Agarwal blocks a searing yorker. How’s that for a first over?

Oh my goodness! Make that 43 wickets with the pink ball for Mitchell Starc! The master of that particular art takes only two balls of this match to strike! His first ball, Shaw defends with a poke halfway between front foot and back. His second draws a similar shot, but the left-armer swings it into the right-hander and this time takes an inside edge back onto the stumps. What a start!

The teams line up with the match officials on the field, and there’s a Welcome to Country before the national anthems. Please be upstanding, and all that. (Or not.) We have the songs. They finish. Old mate really gets out the big tonsil guns for the last few notes. People clap. It’s gonna happen.

Remember, India’s win here in 2018 came after batting first. The Aussie bowlers came out breathing fire, took three wickets in quick succession including Kohli, but then Pujara steadied the innings and made one of his finest centuries, getting them to a total that wasn’t imposing but ended up being enough.

Tim Paine says he would have preferred things the other way around. Adelaide isn’t the bat-first certainty that it once was, with the ball likely to move around, but runs on the board still tend to be the best formula in day-night matches.

“Certainly would’ve liked to have batted first but our attack will perform in all conditions. First morning or afternoon as it is here of a Test match there’s always enough in the wicket. If we can challenge them in the right areas, and we’ll back our guys to do that.”

All the speculation, all the arguments, and it comes down to this. Joe Burns after his wretched recent run will open nonetheless with Matthew Wade for Australia, as Cameron Green makes his Test debut at six.

Joe Burns
Matthew Wade
Marnus Labuschagne
Steve Smith
Travis Head
Cameron Green
Tim Paine (c, wk)
Pat Cummins
Mitchell Starc
Nathan Lyon
Josh Hazlewood

Virat Kohli wins the toss and India will bat first!

The Indian captain says: “Looks like a really nice wicket. Nice and hard. And just runs on the board – it’s priceless in Test cricket especially playing away from home or anywhere actually, but more so away from home, to be able to put some pressure on the opposition when they bat.”

“We prepared really well. The boys have had a lot of time to work in the nets. A couple of tour games as well. We understood the combination well. We understood the combination we wanted to go in with, and we pretty much had everything cheer on our end and hence we announced the team yesterday, and everyone seems pretty excited and calm at the same time heading into the first Test.”

We know this one already. Australia’s will come later.

India
Prithvi Shaw
Mayank Agarwal
Cheteshwar Pujara
Virat Kohli
Ajinkya Rahane
Hanuma Vihari
Wriddiman Saha
Ravichandran Ashwin
Umesh Yadav
Mohammed Shami
Jasprit Bumrah

Session times. Play will start at 14:30 Adelaide time, 15:00 Eastern Daylight, 12:00 WA. The first session will be two hours. The first break will be 40 minutes, and called ‘dinner’, even though it’s at 16:30 and it’s only dinner if you’ve been very bad and been sent to bed early.

Break 16:30 to 17:10 local time. Second session 17:10 to 19:10. Tea break, 19:10 to 19:30. Final session, 19:30 to… hahaha, who are we kidding, probably about 1am given the way these guys bowl their overs.

Pink ball power. Mitchell Starc is back from leave as well, and he has the most wickets in day-night Tests, 42 of them. In fact, Australia’s four bowlers are the top four on the wickets list for this format. Because they’ve played more of it than others, but also because they’re good at it. Looks like tough work for India’s batting.

Where is Warner? It is important to note that Little Davey Warner is not here today. Unfortunately, Little managed to blow out his groin in some sort of high-speed groin accident, and cannot take place. He is currently the highest scorer ever in day-night Tests, with slightly shy of 600 runs (more than half of those coming in one hit last year against Pakistan). Steve Smith is next with exactly 500, and he will play.

Drop us a line. This is important! It’s hard to get through a Test match without some people saying hello, reassuring us that we’re not just shouting into a void. My email is in the sidebar, so is my tweetbox. When Adam Collins takes over after lunch, it will change to his email address. See how this works? And yes, it’ll be Adam and I today, together again, inseparable.

I’m not fussed what you write to me about, just tell me what’s on your mind. If it’s civil and relevant, it may be included on this very page. We are establishing a discourse, friends. That terrible terrible word.

In the meantime, if you’d like a preview that’s a bit more crickety than the previous post, here’s one I prepared earlier.