India's pink-ball frailties exposed under floodlights – Has anything changed since the catastrophe of 36 all out?
Four years removed from the scars of 36 all out, India still don't seem to have mastered the art of playing pink-ball Tests, especially overseas.
Played two, lost two. That’s India’s record in overseas pink-ball Tests. Both those defeats have come against Australia, both at the Adelaide Oval, four years apart.
The December 2020 day-night Test against Tim Paine’s outfit was only India’s second of that kind. They had played, and mastered, Bangladesh in the inaugural night Test in India, at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens, in November 2019, and didn’t start their away campaign terribly poorly, stacking up 244 and then bowling the hosts out for 191 to lead by 53 runs.
That’s when the script unravelled spectacularly. In the blink of an eye, in blinding natural light, India were shot out for 36 in the first session on the third day, their lowest Test score leaving Australia needing a mere 90 for victory. The hosts got there without dramas, by eight wickets.
Between then and this latest pink-ball disaster, India hosted two night Tests – against England in Ahmedabad in February 2021 and against Sri Lanka in Bengaluru the following March. Both games ended in comfortable victories, but India’s last pink-ball outing before this week was two and a half years back.
To get used to the pink ball in a short space of time is anything but straightforward. No matter how much time one spends in the nets, two weeks can’t make up for two and a half years. The ball looks different, it feels different, it offers a different dynamic against a white sightscreen compared to a white ball against a black sightscreen. And that’s not even taking its behaviour into consideration.
In natural light itself, it can be a handful in the hands of skilled performers. When the floodlights take over, the ball seams around plenty and, sometimes, swing too makes its presence felt. Admittedly, the challenge for batters from both sides is pretty much the same, but where one team has played 12 day-night Tests and the other four, there is a marked imbalance that does have an influential say.
Australia’s last pink-ball game was earlier this year, in January against West Indies. It was a game they lost – their only defeat in a day-night Test – but clearly, they are more at home than India when it comes to these conditions, to this specific challenge. That was clear from how even an embattled Marnus Labuschagne, who has four hundreds in pink-ball Tests, shaped up, let alone a marauding Travis Head, who racked up his third century in a day-night five-day encounter.
India's struggle with pink ball clearly visible
It wasn’t just the batters among the Indians who had no muscle memory to fall back on. Of all the pacers who played in this game, Jasprit Bumrah alone had played a day-night Test anywhere previously. Even he struggled early on to come to grips with a ball with an unusual feel, courtesy the multiple layers of pink lacquer that are required to ensure that the colour doesn’t fade quickly. Not for the first time in the last week, Rohit brushed off the challenges of playing with a pink ball with ‘It is what it is, you expect a pink-ball Test when you come to Australia,’ but one couldn’t shake off the feeling that the Indian captain was happy that there are no more pink-ball hurdles for the rest of the series.
Whether so much effort is worth investing in an isolated contest which only comes around maybe once in two years can be debated ad nauseum. But as Rohit pointed out, this is a variant that is probably here to stay – maybe not as a regular feature but certainly as a one-off in a series of four or five games. There is no point bemoaning this novelty when the others are taken in by the concept and when the fans clearly relish – more than 135,000 people flocked the Adelaide Oval between Friday and Sunday to make it the highest ever crowd for a Test involving India in Adelaide and this with two entire days to spare – the night games. And there is no ignoring this reality. India will probably start investing more heavily in pink-ball games in due course because as they have repeatedly shown, they are a little late in embracing change – it happened with limited-overs cricket, it happened with the T20 format, it happened when it came to the DRS – but when they do so, they don’t hold their punches.
The day-night Test is currently only supplementary to and complementary of the traditional red-ball version, and it’s hard to see that changing in the foreseeable future. But if India are to ward off pink-ball blues and avoid seeing red in away day-night Tests, they must walk the extra mile, otherwise Adelaide 2020 and Adelaide 2024 won’t be isolated meltdowns.
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