The innings without a double figure

India began the third afternoon at Adelaide nine for one, sixty-two runs in front, in a Test match they were winning.

They batted for fifteen more overs.

The afternoon

Prithvi Shaw had gone the evening before, bowled by Pat Cummins in the fourth over, and that was ordinary enough. On the third afternoon Jasprit Bumrah, sent in as nightwatchman, was caught and bowled by Cummins in the eighth. India were fifteen for two and still ahead by sixty-eight.

Then the afternoon stopped making sense.

Cheteshwar Pujara edged Cummins to Tim Paine. Five balls later Mayank Agarwal edged Josh Hazlewood to Paine. Four balls after that Ajinkya Rahane edged Hazlewood to Paine. Three wickets, one over apart, all of them caught by the same man standing in the same place, and the score had not moved: fifteen for three, fifteen for four, fifteen for five.

Virat Kohli went in the fourteenth over for 4. At the drinks break India were twenty-six for six.

Wriddhiman Saha was caught by Marnus Labuschagne off Hazlewood. One ball later Ravichandran Ashwin edged Hazlewood to Paine. Hanuma Vihari was the ninth to go. Mohammed Shami was on 1 when a delivery broke his forearm. India's innings ended without a tenth wicket, because there was nobody left to bat.

Full scorecard: Australia v India, 1st Test, Adelaide Oval, 17–19 December 2020 →

What they were defending

India had earned that lead properly. Virat Kohli made 74 from 180 balls and was run out. Cheteshwar Pujara batted 160 balls for 43. The first innings took 93.1 overs and produced 244 on a pitch nobody found easy.

Australia then made 191, and only because Tim Paine came in at 79 for five and made 73 not out. Ravichandran Ashwin took four for 55. India had out-bowled Australia and out-batted them, and led by 53 with a day and a half to play.

Nobody reached ten

Nobody spotted it at the time. It emerged afterwards, when the innings was totted up rather than watched. Agarwal's 9 was the highest score. Vihari made 8. Nobody else got past four.

It had never happened in a Test match before, in any of the two thousand three hundred and ninety-five played since 1877.

The extras column reads 0. No byes, no leg byes, no wides, no no-balls. Twenty-one overs of Test cricket produced not one accidental run, which is its own small impossibility and which nobody mentions, because the other number is larger.

The bowler who took nothing

Hazlewood's figures were 5–3–8–5. Cummins took 4 for 21. Paine caught seven in the match and was named player of it, for 73 not out and a pair of gloves.

Mitchell Starc bowled six overs for seven runs and did not take a wicket. In any other Test of his career that is the line people would remember.

What it did not settle

Australia needed ninety and lost two wickets getting them, in daylight, at a day-night Test where the floodlights never became relevant. India lost by eight wickets.

They then won the series. Without their captain, who flew home after this match, and without Shami, and eventually without half the bowling attack, they won at the Gabba in January and took the trophy home.

So the lowest total in India's Test history sits inside a series India won, which is the part no explanation reaches. The pink ball does not account for it, because Australia had been bowled out for 191 with the same ball on the same pitch. Nerve does not account for it, because the same players held theirs a fortnight later. Twenty-one overs on a Saturday afternoon remain the best-documented and least explicable passage of play in the modern game.

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No. 1 in Collapse, a series of 16.

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