AUS vs IND | 1st warm-up: A lot at stake in practice games for both sides

India’s Test specialists and the members of the Australian Test team will face off against each other in a three-day game starting December 06 in what should be assumed as a dress-rehearsal before the Border-Gavaskar series commences on December 17. Both sides will look to find out the answers to some relevant questions about the composition and balance of the playing XI before the first Test.

The hosts do not have the same sense of dilemmas and tough choices to make after David Warner was ruled out of the first Test. The injury has opened the window for both Joe Burns and rookie Will Pucovski to play in Adelaide. However the same cannot be said about the visitors who will have a lot to ponder upon with regards to their team balance and the choice of personnel for various positions in the team.

Mayank Agarwal is a certainty for the Test series after his dominating performances in his short career where he scored runs all across the world, but there will be questions on who among Shubman Gill and Prithvi Shaw will partner the Karnataka batsman in whites at the Adelaide Oval from December 17. Shaw has a thin experience of batting at the top of the order but definite flaws were exposed in his technique on the tour of New Zealand and the recently-concluded IPL whereas Gill is a potential challenger for Shaw, having scored a truckload of runs for India A on various tours overseas.

The tourists will have a similar set of situations while picking the wicketkeeper among Rishabh Pant and Wriddhiman Saha for the Test side if the latter goes on to prove his fitness in the two three-day games after nursing hamstring injuries in both his legs in the IPL. Pant was brilliant with the bat on the last tour of Australia and scored a daddy hundred in Sydney but his form with the bat has not been good off late and Saha’s better credentials as the man behind the wickets might tempt the team management to go for a safer gloveman at the expense of a lengthy batting line up. Having said that, there will be strong temptations for picking Pant as well, looking at his numbers in Australia and elsewhere in Test format.

Bowling options aplenty for India

In the bowling department, there is an opening for the third seamer in the playing XI with Ishant Sharma not joining the squad for the first game and it will be a tough tussle between Mohammed Siraj, and Umesh Yadav to grab that spot. Navdeep Saini, who has earned quite a reckoning for his pace and accuracy will be a decent challenger for the duo while the competition for the third seamer is expected to hot up before the first Test.

Ravindra Jadeja has been ruled out of the T20 series and subsequently will not take part in at least the first three-day game. There will be a direct toss-up between Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja, and the team management will have to take a tough call while selecting one among the two spinners, who have been champion for the side in the last few years since they have been bowling in tandem on Indian pitches. There will be a temptation of choosing Jadeja, for his better batting abilities and the kind of form he has been in the last 18 months with the bat, but Ashwin will provide better wicket-taking options for the tourists, and the leadership group of the team will have their task cut out while leaving out either of them.

For Test specialists, such as Cheteshwar Puajara and Ajinkya Rahane, who are certain to play in all the games on this tour, these warm-up games will work as the platform to come back to their own before the real game will begin against the red and pink Kookaburra balls in Tests.

For Rahane, the warm-up games will be more than games where he can finetune his batting and its technicalities. Rahane will lead the side when Virat Kohli will return home for the birth of his first child and Rahane would love to get into the groove with the squad in terms of leadership so that he does not get caught playing second fiddle from the second Test.

For the hosts, it’s more than finding the perfect rhythm before the real action begins than making up their mind on the basis of performances in the two warm-up games. Travis Head will lead the side albeit the Test captain Tim Paine will be present on the ground playing as a wicket-keeper batsman. 

Prodigy Will Pucovski will open the batting along with Joe Burns and they would look forward to forging a good partnership at the top of the order after getting relieved of the insecurities about their place in the playing XI, as Warner is more or less out of the first Test.

Another emerging player Cameron Green will push his claim as the all-rounder in the Australian team as Mitchell Marsh has been knocked out of the scene with an ankle injury. Green has been released from the T20 squad to feature in the three-days games and it emphasizes the value he is being given by the leadership group of the Australian Test team.

In the bowling department, the hosts will have their settled three-man pace attack comprising Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins, and Josh Hazlewood while Nathan Lyon will be the sole spinner in the lineup throughout the series unless the pitch in the Sydney Test will promise a lot of assistance to spinners. However, these three-day games will offer the likes of Jackson Bird, Micahel Nesser and Mark Steketee to be on the radar of national selectors in case there are opportunities to play in the times going ahead.

There are enough at stakes for both sides to make these three-day games more than practice matches as there are opportunities and selection calls are on the line based on the performances or even lack of it in these games for the players on either side of the fence.

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