Anil Kumble and Sachin Tendulkar put the BCCI on notice after Mike Procter's decision to hand Harbhajan Singh a three-Test ban © GNNphoto

The two greatest Test series India has played in recent times have been against Australia: 2001 at home and 2008, Down Under. There's a curious symmetry to these two contests: India won the first one, 2-1 and lost the second one 1-2. Harbhajan was the pivot on which both turned: as a hero in the first (he took an astonishing 32 wickets in three Tests) and as a villain in the second, after his run-in with Symonds. If the 2001 series saw the beginning of Tendulkar's transformation into an attritional player, the one just ended saw that master-craftsman persona discarded as Tendulkar went back to being the Master. And in both series India stopped a great Australian team's astonishing winning run: Waugh's team and Ponting's, were looking for a seventeenth consecutive victory and both were thwarted by unlikely defeats.

In the seven years between these two 21st century contests, international cricket was dominated by two developing narratives.

One was driven by the strength of the Indian economy, the purchasing power of its consuming middle class and the consequent and massive increase in the television revenues controlled by the BCCI. The Indian board became the paymaster of world cricket and cricket's calendar became India-centric. This made other countries understandably uneasy and when incidents like the Sehwag controversy in South Africa provoked the BCCI to flex its muscles, Anglo-Australian commentators saw not an evolutionary shift in cricket's centre of gravity, but a thuggish take over, while south Asian fans and journalists saw a western unwillingness to acknowledge the end of empire.

The second story was a growing South Asian unease with the successful Australian attempt to claim the moral high ground in world cricket. Australians don't like it but the country's cricketers are widely seen as potty-mouthed bullies who manage to get away with murder partly because they sledge strategically and partly because the Australian definition of 'hard but fair'—filth on the field and a beer off it—seemed to have been swallowed whole by the umpires and match referees who supervise international cricket. Every time Ponting tells television cameras that after 2003 the Australian team cleaned up its act and then cites figures to show that Australian players have been brought before the match referee much less often than any other major Test side, aggrieved Indian supporters put this down to Australian hegemony. They remain convinced that umpires are willing to sanction shrill petulance (jack-in-box appeals, visible disappointment) but not manly truculence (obscenity, lewdness and intimidation) because the first is directed at umpires while the second stays between players. This sense of being hard done by is reinforced by the pattern of bad decisions suffered by touring teams in Australia, Kumar Sangakkara's appalling decision being perhaps the worst in recent times.

Australian cricket is hegemonic for the best possible reasons. Australia has had the best cricket team by miles for more than ten years, its coaches have, at one time or another, have tried to drill Australian skills into other national squads, its sports science and its training methods are cutting edge and Channel 9's cricket telecast has taught the world how to cover cricket. But because its players fetishize a hardnosed take on the game, they, unlike the West Indies in their pomp, are universally unloved and in recent years the Ugly Australian stereotype has been rendered uglier by Ponting's charmless leadership.

Indians don't think much of Ponting for several reasons. His first tour was dogged by rumours of bad behaviour, his second tour was an embarrassment (he scored less than a dozen runs in three Test matches), his onfield aggression struck Indians as offensive, his unlovely habit of spitting into his palms and rubbing them together left desis wondering how he got people to shake hands with him and not only did he look remarkably like George Bush, he behaved like him too.

Bush invaded Iraq and then managed to get the invasion ratified by the United Nations after the fact. Anglo-American rhetoric about the legitimacy of pre-emptive war is similar to Australian cricket's argument that bullying (so long as it wins matches) can be justified as robustness. 'Hard and Fair' in the world defined by Bush, begins to read like 'Shock and Awe'.

It is in this charged context that the just concluded Test series between India and Australia unfolded, and in the second Test at Sydney, the two grand narratives of 21st century cricket, India's growing economic clout and Australia's cricketing hegemony, met like unsheathed live wires. It didn't help that the tension between the two teams had been personified. Sreesanth and Harbhajan Singh took it upon themselves in the recent one-day series between the two countries to answer sledging with fevered aggression. Harbhajan went on record to say that Australian behaviour was 'vulgar' and that they were bad losers. We are now told that he had a run-in with Symonds in Baroda, so when Sreesanth didn't make the squad to Australia, he was, for the Australian team, the Ugly Indian.

From the Indian point of view, the Sydney Test was a textbook illustration of the way in which an Australian series is loaded against the opposition. The Indian team got a slew of awful umpiring decisions, the Australians did their tiresome all-in-the-game-mate routine, Clarke exploited a gentleman's agreement to claim a dodgy catch, Ponting disclaimed a catch and then unsuccessfully appealed for another that he had obviously grounded (and, post-match, barked at an Indian reporter who questioned him about it), then reported Harbhajan for racially abusing Symonds.

	The most satisfying part of Hansen's judgment is his characterisation of Michael Clarke as an unreliable witness © Getty Images

When Mike Procter upheld the Australian charge and banned Harbhajan for three matches he brought the two live wires into contact and the lights nearly went out on the game. Indian players have been on the receiving end of the match referee's kangaroo court before and know it to be dysfunctional. Procter is a notably inept match referee who presided over the shambles created by Darrell Hair and the Pakistan cricket team last year. For him to have taken the word of the likes of Michael Clarke, who as a batsman had stood his ground after being caught off a massive edge at slip and who as a fielder had confidently claimed a bump ball catch, over the testimony of Tendulkar who insisted he hadn't heard 'monkey' being said, was the final straw. The most satisfying part of Hansen's judgment is his characterisation of the slippery Clarke as an unreliable witness.

I think it's likely that Harbhajan called Symonds a monkey, but judgment can't be based on what I or anyone else thinks: it rests on what can be proven. There was no corroborative evidence in the Harbhajan affair and the hostilities of the Sydney Test had destroyed any trust between the two sides, leaving the Indian team in a state of thin-skinned rage at being robbed. Procter managed to compound this mess by unequivocally finding for the Australians without explaining how he had come to his conclusions.

This is when India flexed its muscle, but the 'India' in question wasn't the BCCI, it was the Indian team. Anil Kumble and Sachin Tendulkar, the two most senior players in the Indian side, one its best bowler and the other its best batsman for nearly twenty years, put the BCCI on notice. They insisted that the Board stand by Harbhajan and made it clear that the team was unwilling to go on with the tour if Procter's decision wasn't reversed.

Journalists who think the BCCI used the occasion to assert itself are just plain wrong. The Indian board has no interest in cricket as such: witness the absurd schedule it framed for the Indian team. Left to itself, the Board would have hung Harbhajan up to dry (as it had sacrificed Bishan Bedi over the 'Vaseline' affair decades ago) and gone on with the tour: it was Tendulkar's ultimatum that goosed them into action. Press criticism of the BCCI's brinkmanship in chartering a plane to fly the team home from Adelaide if the appeal went against Harbhajan, could just as well be directed at the Indian team, because I'm certain that the old firm, Kumble & Tendulkar, had something to do with the arriving one-day specialists being quartered in Adelaide in solidarity with Harbhajan.

I suspect the reason for this last flourish was the report that Judge Hansen was likely to consider new audio evidence that had not been made available to Procter. The tapes didn't have Harbhajan saying 'monkey' but they had Hayden telling Harbhajan that a word he had used amounted to racism. My guess is that the possibility that the Australians would spin this as clinching evidence, drove Kumble and Tendulkar to circle the wagons in Adelaide. And here's the thing: it worked. The Australians agreed to press the lesser charge. Having set up this eyeballing contest, they blinked.

Is this the end of the rule of law as we know it and the onset of anarchy? No. On the evidence of the third and fourth Tests, it feels more like the dawn of a new age of civility on the ground and a possible end to sledging. There was a time in Test cricket (a very long time) when Australia and England were more equal than the rest and the game survived that asymmetry. It'll survive this one.

A shorter version of this post appeared earlier in the Telegraph, which can be read here

	Gavaskar and Tendulkar are Indian cricket's greatest batsmen and one of Gavaskar's claims to greatness was that he retired from cricket on a high © AFP

The story of the Australian tour from an Indian point of view isn't Australia's run at seventeen wins in a row or the mock-epic stand-off after the Sydney Test. No, the real story of the last year, of which this tour Down Under is a part, is Sachin Tendulkar's bid for immortality.

Till 2007 and this unfinished Australian series, a summary description of Tendulkar's career might have read like this: he was one of the great batsmen of the twentieth century, who declined into a merely good batsman in the twenty-first.

It is hard to believe that next year in November, Tendulkar will have been a Test batsman for twenty years. Sunil Gavaskar had sixteen years at the top; so did Dilip Vengsarkar. Mohinder Amarnath had eighteen, but his was an interrupted career. In terms of longevity no one else comes close. Of the three only Gavaskar can sustain the comparison. Gavaskar and Tendulkar are Indian cricket's greatest batsmen and one of Gavaskar's claims to greatness was that he retired from cricket on a high: his last innings was that great 96 against Pakistan in Bangalore, on a track that was turning square. He followed that up with a big hundred at Lord’s playing for the Rest of the World in 1987 and called it a day. So our sense of Gavaskar's career is one of great consistency at a very high level.

This isn't how the trajectory of Tendulkar's career was viewed till recently. The first decade of his career was his time of greatness. It encompassed both his time as a prodigy dazzling the world in Perth and elsewhere and his pomp in the late Nineties when he dismantled bowling attacks with such ruthless intent that Bradman was moved to anoint him as his heir. But as his second decade unfolded, it was hard not to feel that while greatness had been achieved, the promise of immortality had been belied.

This is not to argue that Tendulkar in the twenty-first century was an inconsiderable batsman. He scored lots of runs, hit substantial hundreds, and played match-saving, sometimes match-winning innings. But something had changed, the spark that had once made him not just a very good high-scoring batsman (a Jacques Kallis, say), but a magical stroke-player, impregnable and overwhelming at once, seemed to have been extinguished.

The moment that marked that transformation from genius to journeyman wasn't a failed innings but a successful one: the match-winning hundred Tendulkar made in the Madras Test of 2001. It was the deciding Test of that extraordinary series against Steve Waugh's men. India and Australia had shared the first two Tests, thanks to Harbhajan Singh's heroics and VVS Laxman's sublime double hundred. Laxman scored a pair of lovely sixties at Chepauk but the decisive innings was Tendulkar's. It was a dour, unlovely hundred made to look even more earthbound by Laxman's unearthly cameos and it signaled the arrival of a utilitarian Tendulkar.

Utilitarian because where once Tendulkar's innings had seemed a form of self-expression, he now began to play to purpose. The way he spoke about his batting changed: his refrain became the need to play to the needs of the team, almost as if he was a craftsman working on commission. Part of this was defensive: as it became evident that he wasn't imposing himself on the bowling any more, people began to ask where the Shane Warne-annihilating persona was hiding. Tendulkar answered this chorus by saying two related things: a) no batsman could play the same way through a long career and b) as he had grown into the senior pro of the team, his role had changed in a way that required a more responsible style.

	But the real significance of this brief Australian purple patch has been the manner in which Tendulkar has scored his runs. For the first time in years he has played with intent and without inhibition © Getty Images

This explanation of late-period Tendulkar suggested a batsman using his formidable skills to adapt to circumstances instead of bending circumstances to his will as he had done in his first half of his career. Even his big innings this century seemed to bear witness to a once-great batsman adapting magnificently to the physical toll of a long career.

Take his double century at the SCG in the last Test of India's previous tour of Australia. It was a crucial innings, one that allowed the Indians to press for a victory that eventually eluded them, but that's not why we remember it. We remember it for its freakish aspect: Tendulkar scored 241 runs without once driving through the off-side. He had suffered a string of dismissals trying to drive through cover, so he just put away the shot and worked everything through the onside. His signature shot throughout his career had been that cover drive hit off the back foot standing on tip-toe and he was showing the world that he could limit his repertoire and thrive.

But the change in style was also accompanied by a secular decline in both his batting average and the frequency of his centuries. These things are relative: Tendulkar's 'decline' would constitute success for the merely very good. From the very high fifties, the average dipped to under fifty-five. At the same time the achievements of other batsmen eclipsed Tendulkar's efforts.

Brian Lara reversed a slump that saw his average plunge to into the forties and salvaged his reputation by dragging that figure up into the fifties as he ended his career in a blaze of brilliance and Ponting's career graph read like the opposite of Tendulkar's: he raised his game to such heights in the second half of his career that there were seasons when his results were Bradmanesque. A new generation of batsmen led by Michael Hussey and Kumar Sangakkara produced passages of such consistency and flair that they made Tendulkar look grizzled and tentative.

Then, in 2007, Tendulkar began his bid to rehabilitate himself. In South Africa, in Bangladesh, in England, in India and finally in this series in Australia, he emerged from the cocoon of conservative caution that had marked his batsmanship for more than five years and gave himself permission to play his whole repertoire of shots. The results were mixed: 2007 was a decent year, not an annus mirabilis: some seven hundred runs with a clutch of fifties and a couple of centuries against Bangladesh. Its real importance is only now becoming apparent: it was the necessary run up to his return to vintage form in Australia.

He has hit two fifties and a big, unbeaten 150 in five innings against the best team in the world, one that was aggressively seeking a record sequence of Test wins. This would be reassuring in itself for Tendulkar, when you consider that his last century against respectable opposition came in 2005. But the real significance of this brief Australian purple patch has been the manner in which he has scored his runs. For the first time in years he has played with intent and without inhibition. Every shot from the paddle sweep to the off-side force, to the pull and the improvised upper-cut has been taken out of storage and played. He has taken the fight to the opposition, on and off the field. I don't think it's a coincidence that after the ugly Sydney Test, it was Tendulkar who forced the Harbhajan issue and compelled Sharad Pawar to stand up for his team-mate.

Having put the mirage of captaincy firmly behind him, Tendulkar has stepped into the role he should have claimed years ago: not the senior pro of the Indian team (an NCO's role, meant for lesser men) but its grey eminence, its elder statesman. The way he is batting in Australia, that part will be his to play for years yet, at the end of which he might well stand on the pedestal that Bradman chose for him and which Cricket reserves for her most durable geniuses.

I was planning to write a follow-up post on the Symonds affair after Procter sentenced Harbhajan, when I came across what must be the definitive Indian take on the matter. A blogger called 'strangelove' has posted an exhaustive account of the Sydney Test on Prem Panicker's blog, Smoke Signals, which all of us should read to know what to think. He is withering about aspects of Australian behaviour without demonizing the Australians, he points out the infirmities in Procter's verdict without trivializing the alleged offence and he is particularly good on why Bucknor needed to go. 'strangelove' offers us a sane and morally defensible position on the controversies of this strange match. The post is titled 'The Most Discussable Match' and you can read it here

	Tennis allows three challenges; given umpires of the quality of Benson and Bucknor, half a dozen might be too few © AFP

India lost the Sydney Test because the umpiring was one-sidedly awful. It was good to see Kumble and his team-mates shake hands with the Australians but formal salutation is where congratulations should stop. This was a Test match where the excitement was manufactured by incompetent umpires making weird decisions: the Indians players must have felt like lab rats being chivvied by mad scientists.

While previewing the present series in this blog, I wrote that for the Indians to have a chance the umpires would have to hold their nerve. Well, they didn’t. Test series in Australia have in recent years have followed a pattern: the touring team struggles to to hold its own against the superior home team; then, at vital moments when the beleaguered tourists have a chance of saving the game or winning it, they get a shocker. Or two. Or three. In the Sydney Test the Indians lost count.

I’m not even thinking about lbw decisions which are judgement calls: we’re talking about audible edges being given not out [Ricky Ponting, Andrew Symonds, Michael Hussey], a stumping against Symonds not being given by the third umpire despite video evidence to the contrary, a stumping where Symonds’ heel was raised not referred to the third umpire by Steve Bucknor, a non-existent edge given against Rahul Dravid when his bat wasn’t in the same latitude as the ball and perhaps, most infuriatingly, Sourav Ganguly given out, caught by Michael Clarke because the fielder said so. Benson didn’t ask the square-leg umpire for confirmation, he asked the Australians. The Indians could be forgiven for thinking that a player who had bizarrely stood his ground after being caught off a massive edge, and who had just dropped a sitter off the same batsman, mightn’t qualify as a neutral witness.

To those who would say that Ponting refused to claim a catch in similar circumstances in the first innings, the point is that whether an umpire decides in principle to refer to the third umpire or not, he needs to make his decisions on the basis of his own judgement or by conferring with his fellow umpire, not on the testimony of an interested party, the fielder. Circumstances alter cases: the same Ponting in India’s tense second innings tried to claim a catch that he hadn’t completed [the ball in his hand hit the ground as he completed his dive].

Why do touring teams get such shockers from neutral umpires? I don’t know. Perhaps umpires prefer their appealing technique, perhaps the Australians, as the dominant team, get the benefit of any doubt, but the point at which opposing teams and their supporters begin to despair is when they get a decision like the one Kumar Sangakkara got from Rudi Koertzen, given out caught off a ball that wasn’t near his bat at a point in the match where Sangakkara was leading an unlikely Sri Lankan resurgence.

The Australians have become so used to dodgy decisions going their way that it reflects in their onfield manner. Most batsmen stand their ground when they think they’ve got a faint edge that the umpire mightn’t have noticed; they generally leave when their edges echo round the stadium. When Clarke was caught in slip by Dravid off Anil Kumble the reason he stood his ground despite the deviation and the sound was because he had learnt both from long experience and Symonds’ good fortune in the first innings, that there was a decent chance he would be reprieved. The horror on Kumble and Dravid’s face when they saw he was sanding his ground was comical: their second appeal which Bucknor finally upheld was a masterpiece of disbelieving desperation.

If Benson was incompetent, Bucknor was incompetent and perverse. The moment that summed up this match’s inexplicably bad umpiring was Bucknor’s decision not to refer Dhoni’s appeal for a stumping against Symonds to the third umpire. What was he thinking? Bucknor and the Indians have have a long history of friction and this last performance by him is unlikely to improve things. He is scheduled to stand in the Perth Test: I’d be very surprised if the Indians don’t formally petition the authorities to substitute him. If I was Bucknor, I’d withdraw and use the time to see an opthalmologist: his dismissal of Dravid in the second innings suggests that he’s seeing things.

Looking to the future and how the game can deal with human error, I think Peter Roebuck has the right ideas. The ICC should take a page out of tennis’ book and allow each team a fixed number of challenges so that they can appeal decisions that they think are plainly wrong. Tennis allows three challenges; given umpires of the quality of Benson and Bucknor, half a dozen might be too few. But seriously, if competitive Test matches aren’t to be ruined and if, in particular, Australian tours are to remain credible, cricket’s authorities need to act now.

	Ponting, Harbhajan, Tendulkar and Gilchrist in conversation after Harbhajan's confrontation with Symonds © Getty Images

The Symonds affair and the charge of racial abuse laid against Harbhajan Singh by Ricky Ponting could change the way in which international cricket is monitored and regulated. I say ‘could’ because the affair could also pan out straightforwardly with punishment for Harbhajan and no general consequences for the game.

If there is any corroborative evidence (besides the testimony of Symonds, Matthew Hayden and Ponting) that Harbhajan used racist taunts when he responded to Symonds’ comments by confronting him on the field, Harbhajan should not only be banned for the period laid down by the ICC’s rules, the BCCI should put the spinner on notice: it should warn Harbhajan that any subsequent offence will result in his banishment from international cricket. The board equivocated in the matter of racist abuse from spectators in Vadodara and Mumbai; it mustn’t make that mistake again. Mike Proctor hasn’t revealed the specific comment(s) for which Harbhajan is charged, but the rumour in Australian newspapers is that Harbhjan called Symonds a monkey. Chetan Chauhan, the Indian team manager, has been reported saying that Harbhajan denies having said this; he is also reported as saying in the same breath that ‘monkey’ in Indian usage isn’t a derogatory word. If the report is accurate, this is exactly the kind of shiftiness that the touring team’s management should avoid. If Harbhajan called Symonds a monkey he should go down; preferably forever.

Newspaper reports seem to suggest that the umpires didn’t hear the exchange that gave rise to the charge. Channel 9 has reviewed its audio tapes and found no record of the offensive comments either. They do, however, have recordings of the subsequent chat which involved Hayden, Ponting, Sachin Tendulkar and Harbhajan. So it is possible that these tapes have Harbhajan referring to his comments, perhaps even apologizing for them. In the pictures that I saw while watching the telecast, I saw Harbhajan making what seemed to be conciliatory hand gestures. If he was apologizing and his apology contains the offending word and if that word is ‘monkey’ or something similarly racist, that should be evidence enough.

The other possibility is that in the course of the hearing, Tendulkar, who was batting with Harbhajan at the time and who seemed to have heard part of the exchange, isn’t able to whole-heartedly exonerate Harbhajan. It’s unlikely that he’d explicitly ‘shop’ a team-mate but Tendulkar’s an honourable man and if he heard Harbhajan flinging racist abuse about, he might be reluctant to perjure himself. This is an unlikely outcome: in his public statements about the spat, Tendulkar has said that he heard nothing objectionable said, but it’s just possible that in the grave context of a quasi-judicial hearing, his account of the incident might subtly change in ways unfavourable to Harbhajan.

However, if neither tape nor Tendulkar backs up the Australian charge, then international cricket’s in trouble. Hayden has been quoted as saying that the Australian’s have a very strong case. If the case is based on the kind of connections that are being reported in Australian press, the evidence is underwhelming. The Sun-Herald has reported that the Australian case will be based on the argument that Harbhajan is a ‘repeat offender’. The Australians will, apparently, allege that Harbhajan used the monkey taunt against Symonds in the seventh ODI in Mumbai in October. Michael Slater, who commented on that match, has backed up that claim. The trouble with this argument is that the Australian team didn’t lodge a complaint against Harbhajan at the time and I haven’t heard or read Slater going on record about Harbhajan’s Wankhede behaviour before the current crisis.

Given that Harbhajan and the Australians had tangled in the course of the series and Harbhajan had alleged after the 2nd ODI that the Australians had abused Indian players with ‘personal and vulgar’ words, the ‘repeat offender’ argument, without other corroborative evidence, will seem like a way of settling scores, rather than punishing bigotry. Harbhajan could equally argue that Symonds’ comments were part of a pattern of offensive Australian behaviour. This is what he said after the second ODI in India:

	The Australians will, apparently, allege that Harbhajan used the monkey taunt against Symonds in the seventh ODI in Mumbai in October © Getty Images

“After the match Harbhajan was not laughing and said the Australians had shown themselves to be bad losers after their defeat to India in the semi-finals of the Twenty20 World Cup. "They clearly did not like that," Harbhajan said in the Sydney Morning Herald. "They are a very good cricket side, but that does not mean that they can do whatever they want to do. They say they play the game in the right spirit, but they don't in reality. There is nothing gentlemanly about the way they play."

After being dismissed by Michael Clarke in the 84-run loss, Harbhajan waited mid-pitch and pointed his bat. "I was responding to a lot of vulgar words that were said to me," he said. "I don't have any problem with chitchat on the field, so long as it is about the game. But when it is very personal and vulgar, that is not on. They think you cannot fight back and they do not like it when you do.”

Cricket has been down this road once before. Some years ago Rashid Latif was accused by Adam Gilchrist of calling him a ‘white c__t”. Latif denied the charge and was exonerated; it was his word against Gilchrist’s and there was no way of proving the charge. If the Harbhajan-Symonds dispute ends the same way, the consequences could be larger. If it turns out that Ponting made an accusation of racism which the Australians couldn’t back up, the accused Indians will be left with a lively sense of grievance and injury. There’ll be no shortage of people arguing that the Australians tried to opportunistically fit Harbhajan up in the middle of a closely contested Test match, or, more seriously, that Ponting recklessly used cricket’s adjudicatory process to intimidate and unsettle an opponent.

Australian cricketers famously leave on-field quarrels on the field. Ponting has chosen to take Harbhajan to ‘court’. Slater supports the decision because racism is unacceptable and he’s right. Racism is unacceptable. But if Ponting can’t come up with the evidence for a ‘conviction’, if his case is based on Symonds’ word and Harbhajan’s ‘prior form’, I can see players and officials asking for stump microphones to be left on all the time so that allegations of this sort in the future can be settled by technology. I can also see players retaining libel lawyers and disputes like this one being resolved in real law courts.

If Mike Proctor finds against Harbhajan, Indians might simmer awhile, but the Australians will have been vindicated. If he clears him, there’s a real chance that on-field chat will be systematically monitored in the future, and Ponting’s recourse to the match referee might well be remembered as the day Big Brother came to stay.

	Steve Bucknor is under the spotlight for the wrong reasons © Getty Images

Peter Roebuck has said all that needs to be said about the umpiring on the first day of the Sydney Test. The Indian bowlers, given how thin the attack looked on paper, were first-rate. Disregard the static about how a truly resilient bowling attack would have picked itself off the floor: this one just did. RP Singh and his fellows took Mark Benson's gift to Ricky Ponting in their stride and reduced Australia to 134 for 6. (Ponting, by the way, did a Yuvraj and moaned about getting a bad decision having benefited from his let off!). The spinners then gamely tried to put Steve Bucknor's hearing-aid moment behind them by having Andrew Symonds stumped twice but the third umpire was astigmatic and didn't give the first one, so Bucknor sensibly didn't refer the second stumping to him to stop him from giving technology a bad name.

For the Indians, RP Singh and Sachin Tendulkar were exceptional. The four wickets that RP Singh took were actually out, which, with umpires like these, must count for something. The outstanding Australian player was Brad Hogg. He started the counter-attack and caned the bowling with such smiling good cheer that Anil Kumble and the rest must have wondered if he was Adam Gilchrist's cousin. Then Brett Lee did his part by putting the boot in on the second morning. It's the depth of this Australian lower order that kills visiting sides off; if the batsmen don't get you the allrounders will. This Test may well turn on Symonds' big hundred but that had so many fathers that it must count as a collaboration, not an individual achievement.

I haven't watched a lovelier innings than the one VVS Laxman played today in years. The cover drives were reliably sublime but it was the onside shots, the whips and pulls and flicks that made me grin and nod like a hypnotized child. When threading a packed off-side field wasn't challenging enough, he seemed to experiment, for the sake of his art, with more improbable angles. Long legged and stooped, Laxman occupies the crease like a slightly worried, but marvellously graceful stork. His stroke-play is non-violent; when he's in his zone the strokes seem to be played in some abstract cause - beauty? geometry? - rather than the needs of the contest itself. It isn't true, of course. His epic innings have always been played in ferociously competitive contexts; it's just that he never looks dogged or fierce or elaborately determined.

That said, this innings mightn't rank amongst his best because it doesn't seem big enough. Size matters; India needed a repeat of his two previous centuries at Sydney, a hundred and fifty at least. If stumps had been taken on the second day with Laxman and Rahul Dravid at the crease, Indian fans could have gone to bed dreaming of six hundred runs, Kolkata redux. As things stand, a sensibly optimistic scenario would have India matching the Australian score over two sessions and a bit on the third day and then look to RP Singh, Kumble and the enigmatic Harbhajan Singh to keep the Aussies down to a plausible fourth-innings target. One of Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Yuvraj Singh has to get a century for any of this to happen. If it is Yuvraj, he will have earned his Test spurs and this blog will happily abase itself and acknowledge its absolute ignorance. But someone had better do it, because if they don't, Laxman's magical innings will be diminished; it'll become one more pretty thing to be salvaged by desis from the familiar wreckage of defeat.