Shoehorning Yuvraj Singh into the side didn't work and his body language wasn't encouraging either © Getty Images

In a perverse way, it was a pleasure to be beaten by the Australians. It was a reality check conducted by a first-rate professional team. Amongst the many good things about the Australian demolition job, one stood out: Ponting’s handling of Hogg. Despite the rough treatment he suffered at the hands of Tendulkar and Ganguly, Ponting kept him on and by the end of the Test, instead of being a marginal man, he was looking like an asset to the Australian team, going into Sydney. It was a fine piece of man-management, an investment of faith that will likely pay off later in the series. Which brings us to the way the Indian tour selectors managed their players, particularly Dravid.

Rahul Dravid in the kind of form he’s in, isn’t just a bad opener, he’s a blight. In both innings in this MCG Test, but most particularly in the first innings when there was everything to play for after a decent bowling performance by Kumble and Co., Dravid’s example killed such momentum as the Indian bowlers had generated and demoralised his fellows. He’s a great batsman, completely out of sorts, who should be playing at No. 6 so that he doesn’t have the responsibility of giving the Indian innings a start. He was forced to open because the people who picked the team for the Melbourne Test wanted to have their cake and eat it: shoehorn Yuvraj Singh into the side without making difficult choices. Well, it didn’t work.

Dravid was clearly unhappy doing an opener’s job despite his press statements. And he has a right to be: to mess about with India’s best and most consistent middle-order batsman since Tendulkar’s glory days, especially when he’s going through a lean period, is stupid and inconsiderate. To watch the hero of India’s last Australian tour batting like an oppressed bank clerk was awful. In the seventies and eighties when public sector unions in India were stronger than they are now, they would ‘work to rule’, i.e. they would sleepwalk through their jobs in slow motion, doing the barest minimum required by the law. Unlike those time-servers Dravid, as always, gave his all, but the end result was the same: an agonized crawl.

What makes the decision to coerce Dravid into opening even more infuriating is that it was done to make room for a pretender. Yuvraj doesn’t belong in Test cricket. He’s a wonderful limited-overs player who, unfortunately for India’s Test fans, scores the occasional century on the sub-continent’s dead wickets to stay in contention. If you’re playing a side with one dysfunctional fast bowler, a defensive spinner and a bunch of middling medium pacers on a flat track, then Yuvraj is the bully you need. In any other circumstance, he ought to be India’s first pick for 12th man. In the first innings of this Test Yuvraj mimed elaborate dissatisfaction when he was given a bad decision. Given that he had just been let off when he nicked one off Hogg that wasn’t given, you have to marvel that he had the gall to moan. To top that, in the second innings when Hogg had him lbw with a flipper that was going to hit middle, he still managed to look injured in that hard-done-by way that he’s patented.

If the squad’s selectors want to gamble on a batsman, much better that they gamble on Sehwag who is, as Ian Chappell persistently points out, the kind of aggressive opening batsman who might seize the initiative from Australia. At least Sehwag can point to previous successes Down Under. Since we haven’t got another spinner in the touring party, Harbhajan Singh will play in Sydney despite his performance here, so it’s even more urgent that the Indian team gets its batting sorted out. Given Harbhajan’s recent record, Sehwag’s inclusion would at least give Kumble the option of an offspinner who occasionally flights the ball.

None of this is likely to happen. I have the sinking feeling that in the name of consistency and giving Yuvraj a proper run, we’ll go into the Sydney Test with the same team. It’s meant to be a spinner’s wicket and I can already see Yuvraj in the nets, bowling his left-arm slows.

	Michael Hussey averages 86 in his last eighteen Tests, a bit less than Sangakkara's 90 over a similar number of Tests © Getty Images

Omer Admani made a reasonable point in response to the previous post about Hussey. He said:

“His average seems to be stunning, but there seems to be a trend on offer in the past few years: Mohd Yousuf, Younis Khan, Ponting, Sangakkara, and others have probably have had similar averages in the past few years (around the period Hussey made his debut).”

Omer’s point is that a decline in bowling standards coupled with featherbed pitches have led to a general inflation of batting averages. The implication of this is that Hussey seems exceptional only because his career began after this trend had been established. Other major batsmen have lower averages because they began playing earlier, at a time when conditions were harder for batsmen.

So despite the fact that I can barely count, I decided to run a statistical experiment. I picked a bunch of batsmen with some claim to ‘greatness’ and since Hussey’s only played 18 Tests, I calculated their batting averages over the last 18 Tests that they had played. In nearly every case this meant the Tests they had played since 2005-2006, which coincides with Hussey’s debut season. I couldn’t find a way of telling Statsguru to do this, so I brought up the Innings by Innings list for each one of them, counted off the last 18 Tests, totted up the runs and divided by the innings they had played (minus the not-outs). These are the results (rounded off):

Michael Hussey: 86
Kumar Sangakkara: 90
Mohammad Yousuf: 82
Ricky Ponting: 77
Jacques Kallis: 67

Omer’s point that other players have racked up similar averages seems to be borne out, though his conclusion that this is an easier epoch for batsmen would need more systematic research that this back-of-the-envelope calculation. For starters you’d have to look at the averages of batsmen like Dravid, Tendulkar, Gilchrist, Hayden etc. over their best seasons. There’s a prima facie case that contemporary averages are higher than they used to be, but the records of many more batsmen, present and past, would need to be number-crunched to make the case for grade inflation.

It’s worth saying that Sangakkara, Yousuf, Ponting and Kallis are exceptional; many of Hussey’s heavyweight contemporaries have less than superlative averages over their last 18 Tests.

This is what some of Hussey’s team-mates managed:

Matthew Hayden: 51
Michael Clarke: 49
Adam Gilchrist: 33

And these are the equivalent figures for India’s champions:

Sourav Ganguly: 53
Rahul Dravid: 48
VVS Laxman: 47
Wasim Jaffer: 46
Sachin Tendulkar: 42

If Hussey and the Big Four (Sangakkara, Yousuf, Ponting, Kallis) keep their post 2005-06 averages going over the next two years, there’ll be reason to believe Hussey is a symptom of a wider trend. On the other hand if the numbers for the others dip and Hussey keeps his figures flying, it’ll be time to bend the knee and say “Bwana”.

	Michael Hussey's already done enough for us to acknowledge that he is as good as the best in the contemporary game © Getty Images

One of the really interesting things about the Australian team right now is the standing of Michael Hussey. The man has played eighteen Tests: he is about to cross the threshold that's normally used to benchmark player performances, which is twenty Tests. And as we know, he has a batting average in the mid-80s. Allowing for Australian dominance, average inflation, wretched bowling attacks, making, in short, every deduction that a petty Indian fan might make to cut an Australian champion down to size, you're still left with figures that lift him so far above Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting, Jacques Kallis and Kumar Sangakkara that you'd think cricket writers would be falling over themselves to crown him the Badshah of Batsmanship.

Not a bit of it. A few weeks ago, during Sri Lanka’s tour of Australia, Ian Chappell went on at great and carping length on how shocked he was that Hussey hadn't put his hand up to open for Australia when Justin Langer retired and how Hussey had missed a huge opportunity because Phil Jaques had made that position his own. I don't know about Chappell but if India had a player averaging 60 in the middle order, I'd have picketed the BCCI offices to uphold his right not to open. Even allowing for the fact that Hussey has opened the innings at the first-class level, I still can't follow why you'd want to mess with someone who has been delivering numbers like 86.18 per innings.

It's not just Chappell: listening to Channel 9's commentators, it's hard not to get the feeling that they're puzzled, even vaguely embarrassed by his statistics. Hussey himself is endearingly modest about his achievement. Talking to an Australian newspaper he said:

"I must admit I'm surprised and shocked by my numbers but it's early in my Test career. I'd love to retire with an average of 60 but it's in the nature of the game that it all levels out. I know deep down it's going to come down to a more realistic region as my Test career continues."

There are lots of bowlers round the world, not least the ones in the Indian touring party, who must be praying Hussey's right, but his self-deprecation doesn't explain why he has been so mutedly acclaimed. Just to put his achievement in perspective, after eighteen Test matches, Tendulkar's average was a fraction above 38, Dravid's was just under 50 and Brian Lara was a hair over 55.

One reason for the lack of full-throated acclamation might be a certain embarrassment on the part of the Australian cricket establishment that it waited till Hussey had amassed 15,313 first-class runs before picking him for Australia. I know that subcontinental selectors sometimes pick players before they're ready for the rigours of international cricket (Parthiv Patel is the classic example) but making someone serve a 15,000-run, eleven-year, apprenticeship seems excessive. Perhaps Australia's cricket mandarins got the timing of Hussey's elevation desperately wrong and are reluctant to admit to it.

Or perhaps Hussey's case illustrates a larger problem with cricket appreciation: the way in which a ruling aesthetic obscures the achievement of players whose methods don't fit its criteria. I haven't watched Hussey often enough to be able to confidently characterise his style, but the little I've seen suggests soundness and efficiency rather than grace, elegance, in-your-face aggression or unearthly stroke-play. As a left-handed batsman, Hussey is the Anti-Lara. There's no flourish, little follow-through and he doesn't fill you with the excitement of watching a great but fallible talent. If I were Australian, watching him would fill me with tranquility and confidence and calm, the sense that Hussey was at the wicket and all was right with the world.

Players like Tendulkar and Lara have the reputations they do partly because they play extraordinary shots, strokes that the averagely good player would find hard to carry off. Lara's bizarrely flamboyant driving where the bat describes a complete circle takes your breath away because it's hard to imagine how, in the course of that magnificent revolving-door flourish, he manages to hit the ball in the middle of the bat. Conversely, Tendulkar is venerated by his peers, especially bowlers, because it's hard to fathom how he generates such power with that curiously abbreviated cover drive, played on the up, off the backfoot.

	It's baffling that someone as ordinarily good as Michael Clarke seems to evoke more enthusiasm amongst Australian pundits than the Olympian figure of Hussey © Getty Images

But what if, like Hussey, you scored at a decent rate (his strike rate is over 53, considerably quicker than Dravid or Laxman), hit centuries and fifties regularly and in general were so massively consistent that you piled up this mountainous average, all the while playing in a matter-of-fact way? Wouldn't spectators and pundits have to re-work the aesthetic that rules our appreciation of batsmanship? If Everyman's results turn out to be consistently and conspicuously better than those achieved by aesthetically certified Genius, wouldn't we have to redefine what it means to be 'great' or a 'genius'? If Vijay Singh found a way of beating Tiger Woods regularly and filling his cabinets with winner's trophies from the majors, how long would it be before golf pros began teaching Vijay Singh's way with the driver? Ilie Nastase was commonly acknowledged to be a genius, but Bjorn Borg defined genius out of the equation by demonstrating year after year that topspin and incredible fitness married to the best temperament in tennis added up to greatness.

Now Hussey's career may or may not turn out to be Bradmanesque, but he's already done enough for us to acknowledge that he is as good as the best in the contemporary game; very likely better. So it's baffling that someone as ordinarily good as Michael Clarke seems to evoke more enthusiasm amongst Australian pundits than the Olympian figure of Hussey. Clarke is widely touted as Ponting's heir apparent (incredibly, Clarke seems to think so too) and the Australian press is eloquent about his precocity as a player, his litheness in the field and his brilliance as a batsman.

This is a useful example of the ruling aesthetic trumping achievement. There's little a commentator likes better than a batsman 'using his feet' and Clarke is Twinkletoes himself. Pundits might be better occupied looking at the results of his shimmying. He has a Test average of 46. He has played twenty-nine Tests and after his eighteenth, his average was around 38. It's interesting that Clarke was picked for Australia when he was 23 in 2003 while Hussey had to wait till 2005 by which time he was 30. The only half-reasonable explanation for this is that Hussey in his first-class career was an opening batsman and got his 'break' in Test cricket in that role whereas Clarke's always been a middle-order batsman. It's an unsatisfactory explanation simply because while there's a case to be made against elevating a middle-order batsman to open the innings (because he's unused to starting his innings against the new ball etc.) there can be no rational argument against using a hugely prolific opening batsman in a middle-order role.

The fact is that Hussey would have played for Australia earlier if he'd been a blond, bubbling, all-dancing middle-order batsman. This Inconvenient Truth (to borrow Gore's ponderous capitals) is absurd, but undeniable. The folly of not selecting him earlier becomes more apparent with every innings he plays: this is Hussey's highest average since his fourth test. For the sceptic who thinks it's bound to be downhill from here on, it's worth pointing out that Hussey's average at the end of his tenth Test was in the lowly upper sixties. Through the last eight Tests his average has been rising! I suspect that selectors and pundits who thought that Clarke was Australian cricket's golden future are finding it hard to admit that they nearly overlooked the greatest batsman of Ponting's generation.

Speaking as an Indian, I wish they had.

	If Anil Kumble's side performs well on the Australian tour, it will be good for Test cricket as a competitive sport © Getty Images

The Indian tour of Australia that's just gotten under way, is historically significant for all sorts of reasons. It's important for India for the same reason as every other tour of Australian has been: it offers us the opportunity to do what we have never done before — beat Australia at home. It has been nearly sixty years since we started playing Test matches against the Australians and to not have won an Australian rubber even once, is, well, feeble. And it's no use saying we nearly beat them the last time round: 'nearly won' doesn't show up in Wisden.

It's significant for Australia because Ricky Ponting's men have a real chance of breaking the record for most consecutive Test wins set by Steve Waugh's Australians. Waugh won sixteen Test matches in a row and the current team took their tally to fourteen by destroying the Sri Lankans over two Test matches. We're going to play four Test matches against them, so theoretically the Australians could have notched up seventeen in a row by the time we get to the final Test at the Adelaide Oval.

I don't think that will happen but given this Australian team it's within the bounds of possibility. If it comes to pass (and as fans of an Indian touring team we should always consider worst-case possibilities) international Test cricket might have to consider letting Australia field a second team at the Test level if only to allow other teams the satisfaction of beating an Australian side.

Even the second-worst possibility, losing the series 2-0 or 3-0, will mark a new low for Test cricket. Never has any team dominated Test cricket as completely as the Australians have, not even the West Indies under Lloyd. The fact that the present Australian team is competing against its predecessor for the record of most consecutive Test wins speaks for itself. One-sidedness in Test cricket isn't best illustrated by Bangladesh playing, say, India; it is increasingly illustrated by Australia on one side and Country X on the other.

There's only one team in the world that has played Tests against Australia in the twenty-first century on roughly level terms and that team is India. The last three Test series between the two teams have been split: one won, one lost and one drawn. Yes, I know, we would have won the last rubber we played in Australia 2-1 if we had closed out the Sydney Test, but, like I said, nearly isn't a number.

Still, the fact that India has been competitive over time is important not just for the morale of Indian cricket but for the Test cricket as a competitive sport in general. You could argue that England's Ashes victory was a bigger event on cricket's Richter Scale, given the history of that rivalry, but a country as consistently mediocre as England was never going to lead a sustained challenge to Australian hegemony and so it proved. There was a time when South Africa briefly threatened to take Australia on at its own game—fast bowling, fielding, aggression—but that was years ago and the robotic brittleness of Graeme Smith's team has been brutally exposed by the Australians.

That leaves Kumble's men gingerly holding the torch for the Rest of the World. What are their chances? If we overcome, as we did on our last tour of Australia, the jitters of the first Test and manage to draw it, I think we have a reasonable chance of splitting the series. Draw at the MCG, win at the SCG, lose at the WACA and bring out the batting heroics to draw the last Test in Adelaide. That's the sanguine but sane scenario. The insanely optimistic one is that we win at Sydney and don't lose at Perth. Everything else remains equal and we win 1-0.

It all hinges on Anil Kumble winning the toss at Melbourne and electing to bat. The two men who'll walk out to open the innings for India could any one of three combinations: Wasim Jaffer with Karthik, Dravid or Sehwag. I think Kumble will open the series with Karthik because Sehwag would be too large a gamble for the first game and forcing Dravid to open to accommodate Yuvraj would feel a bit like pushing your soundest batsmen to open in conditions where you're likely to need his solidity lower in the order. Unless Dravid volunteers to do the job; as I write this, he has opened with Jaffer against Victoria and is doing well. If we win the toss the Indian line-up has the opportunity to make a substantial score and scrap for a draw. If we lose the toss and field, we'll be a match down by the time we get to Sydney, because the Indian team has a scarily fragile bowling attack.

Harbhajan will likely play only the one Test, the match in Sydney, so for most of the time, India will be served by Kumble and three seamers. Three of them are left-arm fast-medium seamers. The two who aren't, Ishant Sharma and Pankaj Singh, are frighteningly green. Either Kumble and Zaheer, the two senior bowlers, turn on the magic with a regularity that's unfair to expect, or one of the support bowlers turns out to be a revelation. If neither happens I can't see how we're going to bowl this Australian batting card out twice with the bowlers we have. And if we come in to bat second with the kind of scores the Australians raised against Sri Lanka, say 600 for 5, our golden oldies will eventually buckle under the strain of playing catch-up.

So we need lots of luck with the coin, consistency from Jaffer, several last hurrahs from the Quartet, inspiration from Ishant Sharma (or someone like him) and umpires who aren't over-awed by the greatest team in the world. Otherwise Australia will get to eighteen on the trot, Phil Jaques could be confirmed as the greatest opening batsman since Gavaskar and Mike Hussey might, in fact, turn out to be a left-handed Bradman. It'll be the end of Test cricket as we know it. So it isn't just the Border-Gavaskar trophy that he's vying for: Captain Kumble holds the future of the long game in his hands.

	Sanath Jayasuriya scored 78 in his final Test innings © AFP

A fifty and a wicket: useful but not remarkable figures…unless you know that 24 of those 78 runs had been scored in a single over off that blameless swing bowler, James Anderson. Jayasuriya's career statistics—his aggregates, his averages, his centuries, the number of wickets he took—give the same impression: they suggest a more than useful player, not a remarkable one. They lie.

In a career that spanned eighteen years, Jayasuriya played, in the idiom of Hindi films, an extraordinary double role: journeyman and genius. He was a useful bits-and-pieces player, fielding alertly, chipping in with the odd wicket (he took 98 wickets in 109 Test matches) scoring the necessary fifty (he had 31 half-centuries to his name); he was also, in his fearsome prime, the most destructive opening batsman in the world.

Sri Lankan cricket over the turn of the century resembles nothing as much as the great Bombay multi-starrers of the Eighties. It's a romance with three outsiders as leading men: Arjuna Ranatunga, Muttiah Muralitharan and Sanath Jayasuriya. None of them belonged to the tiny elite that dominated cricket in their country. Murali, the Tamil from Kandy, Ranatunga, the man who became captain despite not having attended St Thomas and Royal, the two public school nurseries of Sri Lankan cricket and finally, Jayasuriya, the maverick from Matara who re-invented himself as a player in mid-career and in the process changed the nature of batsmanship.

It might seem odd to bracket Jayasuriya with Muralitharan, a man who has broken nearly every bowling record in the book, and who has a real claim to being regarded as the greatest bowler in the history of the game. Jaysuriya's batting average in Test matches is in the region of 40 and in the limited overs game it hovers in the low thirties, decent figures but scarcely a claim to cricketing immortality.

And yet Jayasuriya was the most significant batsman of the fin de siecle, historically more important than Sachin Tendulkar or Brian Lara or Ricky Ponting. Glenn McGrath, no friend of Sri Lankan cricket had this to say of him: "…it is always a massive compliment to someone to say they changed the game, and his storming innings in the 1996 World Cup changed everyone's thinking about how to start innings."

Jayasuriya's significance is not statistical, though heaven knows that at the high points of his career he climbed peaks never attempted by more consistent players. He is a landmark in the history of the game because he was a successful heretic, the Martin Luther of modern cricket. He made the rules of orthodox batsmanship (getting to the pitch, getting in line, playing along the ground and that holiest of holies, playing with a straight bat) seem overstated and dogmatic.

Jayasuriya needed to play away from his body because he routinely hit balls wide of him on the up; he played with his bat at an angle of forty-five degrees because he was not trying to show the whole face to the ball, he intended to hit it with an angled blade and he used eye, timing and powerful forearms to get elevation and power. Jayasuriya's batting stance has been hugely influential. The classical stance had the feet six inches apart: Jayasuriya stance has his feet more like two feet apart. He didn't so much go forward or back as shift weight, rocking on to the back foot for the cut and the pull or crooking his front leg to drive, flick or pull on the up. He played like a batter in baseball: if the ball was in the hitting zone, there or thereabouts, it had to go.

What's more, he did this in Test cricket as an opening batsman, with a triple century against India in Colombo in 1997 and that magnificent double century against England at The Oval in 1998 which, as much as Muralitharan's bowling, won them the Test match. It was one of the great attacking innings in the history of Test cricket, played as it was to force a result in limited time. It was Jayasuriya's success in proving that his unorthodox methods worked in both ODIs and the more demanding context of Test cricket that paved the way for players like Virender Sehwag and Adam Gilchrist: that's the real significance of McGrath's tribute.

More than most batsmen, Jayasuriya's technique reflected the way the game had changed. He was one of the main conduits through which the lessons in attacking batsmanship taught by the one day game were channelled into Test cricket. His technique took full advantage of the physical immunity that modern helmets lent batsmen. He hooked firm-footed or off the front foot without going back and across because the old fear of mortal injury that had been hard-wired into the heads of an earlier generation of opening batsmen vanished from the minds of contemporary players. And the astonishing power of modern bats was tailor-made for Jayasuriya's game: those short arm pulls that would have once steepled into waiting hands, now cleared the ropes.

There were better batsman than Jayasuriya during his time in international cricket and there will be many better ones in the future, but for the cricket historian he will remain that rare player who embodied a turning point in the game. As the twentieth century gave way to the twenty first, the art of batting was transformed and for a brief but critical period—say from 1996 to the end of the century—Jayasuriya was at the cutting edge of change.

This was published in the Telegraph, Kolkata.