Australia v India: fourth Test, day two – live!

Fifty and gone! Outside the off stump and swinging away, and Paine has been leaving those all day long. The milestone may have disrupted his thinking though, he felt like it was time to have a go at one, but it was not. The away swing turns his off-drive into a regulation edge to the right of second slip, where Rohit Sharma does the job leaning across.

99th over: Australia 311-5 (Green 46, Paine 50) Spin time, Washington Sundar’s funny off-breaks to Green. A real leg-side trap: short mid-on, short midwicket, and short leg. The former two are maybe 10 to 15 paces from the bat. Green nearly edes to slip! Goes back but the ball is too full, so he prods at it desperately to keep it out and gets a nick high on the bat that loops rather than going flat, and drops short of Rahane lunging forward. Green flicks another ball square, giving strike to Paine, who drives into the cover gap for his single.

98th over: Australia 309-5 (Green 45, Paine 49) One run from his minor milestone is Paine as he drops Thakur to midwicket and runs with the stroke. Simple accumulation. Green plays down to fine leg, a shot that he gets a lot of value from given his height. He can just get over the top of anything vaguely straight and divert it away. Thakur continues wide and Paine leaves. Australia have nearly got through an hour here, that puts them significantly on top.

97th over: Australia 307-5 (Green 44, Paine 48) Siraj to Green and now the batsmen are getting some deliveries they can work around. Fuller and straight and Green drives through wide long-on for three. Paine nudges a single square.

96th over: Australia 303-5 (Green 41, Paine 47) Shardul Thakur to bowl replacing Natarajan. He’s on the shorter side, powerfully built across the shoulders, and swings the ball conventionally, as he showed when his first ball yesterday picked up Marcus Harris by swinging into the left-hander’s pads and being flicked to square leg. He starts with a warm-up ball, too full, that Paine whips through midwicket for four. Gun-shy, Thakur then bowls too wide for the next five balls and Paine leaves them all alone. Advantage batsman.

95th over: Australia 299-5 (Green 41, Paine 43) Siraj with another impressive over to Paine, getting the ball to move through the air and off the seam. There won’t be much in this track for long though, you wouldn’t think, and India still haven’t got the wicket they need. It almost comes in unorthodox fashion when Paine shuffles forward to negate the swing and defends back to the bowler on the bounce. The batsman stays where he is, looking at Siraj after the shot, and Siraj realises Paine is out of his crease and pings a throw at the stumps. Paine is a wicketkeeper, so he twigs in time and darts his foot back, and would probably have made it safely had the throw not missed the stumps by a fraction. But that would have been tight.

94th over: Australia 298-5 (Green 41, Paine 42) Natarajan to Paine, having come around the wicket, and there’s still inswing with a bit of seam away, but he’s starting his line a few inches too wide. When he bowls at the stumps Paine just blocks a little drive away to mid-on and runs with the stroke. That brings Green onto strike, who edges the ball for four! A proper nick that time from a big drive, reaching away from his body, and it flies through third slip which is untenanted. Two slips and a gully for India. It does make you wonder, with the newer ball, do you really need all of deep point, cover, mid off, mid on, square leg?

93rd over: Australia 293-5 (Green 37, Paine 41) Siraj bowls, still getting swing with the new ball but hasn’t been able to make Paine play consistently enough, a lot of balls being left. There’s a leg bye from the over but nothing more, making it technically a maiden to the bowler. That’s three in a row.

David Branch writes in – he should start a partnership with Joe Root. “I read your comment about fast moving thunderstorms and it reminded me of the first day of the last Ashes Test at the Gabba. I was up in Brisbane to meet my brother over from the UK and to catch a bit of cricket. We watched the first session and headed back into the city and got caught in a downpour mid-afternoon. I looked on the radar and there was this tiny red spot right over us which didn’t move for the next 30 minutes. So fast-moving it was not. On a rain-related note, It was hammering down with rain all last eveing in the Doncaster area but I was still able to watch the Big Bash game 20kms away at the MCG where it didn’t really rain until the last over or two. Melbourne’s weather can be really local.”

Well David, I would say that 30 minutes is very fast moving compared to settling in for three straight days of mizzle in Bristol. Job done, move on. As for the Melbourne version of Doncaster, I grew up about 20 k’s north of there, and can affirm that the weather in the hills is often several degrees different and with an entirely distinct rain system to the inner city.

92nd over: Australia 292-5 (Green 37, Paine 41) Swing for the left-arm Natarajan into Green, hitting his pad but almost outside the line of leg and swinging away from leg as it strikes. Green leaves the next, angled across, then pokes after the subsequent ball but misses. A maiden in the end as Natarajan finds some control.

91st over: Australia 292-5 (Green 37, Paine 41) An entire bay’s worth of Star Wars stormtroopers have just arrived to sit beneath the press box, so we’ll look forward to seeing whether they veer towards obnoxiousness or jolliness later in the day. They’ve also got a C3P0 and a Yoda, who I must saw is looking a lot broader across the shoulders than the original. Sympathy for the bay attendant who is trying to seat them all in their allocated virus-era seats. Siraj bowls a testing over to Paine, keeping it out beyond his off stump, aside from an inside edge which sneaks past his timbers instead. No run.

90th over: Australia 292-5 (Green 37, Paine 41) Huge swing from Natarajan to start his over, but the rest of his delivery is all over the place. One, he’s overstepped to deliver a no-ball. Two, he’s started it wide outside off, so with the away swing it ends up going to first slip. Three, Pant hurts his finger diving across to avoid more byes. If I didn’t mention it already, Navdeep Saini had a muscle strain yesterday and won’t bowl, so India’s attack is Natarajan, Thakur, Siraj, with Washington Sundar for spin.

89th over: Australia 290-5 (Green 37, Paine 40) Siraj with the missile from the other, and he tries a couple of bouncers in between pitching up. One of those short balls goes soaring off the surface and clears Pant behind the stumps by a large margin, flying away for four byes. A few singles in between times and Australia have enjoyed a lucrative start.

88th over: Australia 282-5 (Green 36, Paine 38) Quite the opening over! Newish ball being taken by Natarajan, up against Green. Natarajan beats the bat a couple of times, once striking the pad, once dipping away from the outside edge by a sliver of daylight. In between times, Green dismisses him twice to the boundary straight down the ground, back past the bowler. We’re certainly underway.

Emails ahoy. “Oh the joy of both waking up to and going to bed to Test match cricket. It may be the winter cricket giddiness, but forgive me this premature comment: Could Cameron Green turn out to be the solution to Australia’s post-Paine skipper conundrum? If he were to continue to play himself into being a middle-order fixture and Paine persists for another two years, Green could be – in both temperament and skill – the ideal man to take the reins, despite his relative youth. Labuschagne is obviously the premier batsman not named Warner or Smith, but there’s something about his presence that, without being harsh, does not seem to lend itself to captaincy.”

You would find a number of people who would agree with you on the latter point, David Reynolds. As for the former, I think we should give the young man time to make enough runs to feel established as a Test batsman before considering higher honours. From my perspective, Pat Cummins is an excellent captaincy candidate once Paine finishes up, and would break the orthodoxy of Australia only ever giving the job to the best batsman rather than the best likely captain.

If you’d like a little more detail on the day’s play, and you’d also like to meet the very cute baby of my OBO colleague Adam Collins, here we are with Winnie Mae going through our daily wrap (while wearing a wrap).

Here is the wires report on yesterday’s play, for the basics.

Had a lot of good correspondence yesterday: people back at work and having a sneaky read, people still on holiday and enjoying that, people late at night on the other side of the world. Fire me off an email or a tweet via the contact details in the sidebar.