Australia have earned a handsome lead – 333 with one wicket standing – after recovering from a wobble early in their second innings. India had looked in a promising position on Sunday – they had the hosts 91 for 6 – but they struggled to get through the tail and will have to break the record for the highest successful chase at the MCG to win the Test.
“I felt like we were probably ahead of the game just the whole way,” Labuschagne said. “I was sitting up at the top with our batting coach Michael Di Venuto and I was just watching every ball. We’re scrapping for runs, there was overthrows, leg byes, running twos, that last bit had everything. I mean we even had the game finished with a no-ball wicket into a last ball four, so I mean people that say Test cricket isn’t exciting, I mean I’m a player and I was watching and I was excited.”
The natural wear and tear of the pitch as a Test match goes into the fifth day has brought a new challenge for the batters for the first time in this series.
“As the game’s gone on the bounce has got less and more inconsistent,” Labuschagne said, wearing a bandage on his right arm from where an Akash Deep ball kicked up and hit him. “So we’re getting more balls hitting the stumps, more balls skidding through and we’re getting that coming through on the data. And that’s probably the major difference. The seam movement’s probably been the same [throughout the game] but just the amount of bounce is significantly lower so that makes for pretty tricky batting there. More balls are hitting the stumps from a shorter length, balls are skidding through, few balls shot up today.”
“About the pitch, I feel like you need to get one or two good partnerships, I feel like from the first day the movement was there off the pitch,” Reddy said. “The pitch is doing something and we can see later on the fourth day it was doing a little bit more, but we don’t need to put more pressure like the pitch is doing this or that, we need to go instantly according to the situation.”
Does it help that India have a century-maker in their ranks as they prepare for a big chase? “Obviously when I come to the second-innings batting, it’s a fresh innings, I can’t start my innings from 100,” Reddy said. “So it’s a fresh innings, I have to start from starting, how I approached in the first innings, I have to be the same thing, and let’s see what the team plan, and according to that we’ll plan, and I think I have to leave the 100 behind and start the fresh innings.
“We’ll come back strong in batting order, what we have done in the first innings, we’ll rectify the mistakes … we have to first take the last wicket and then we’ll plan accordingly.”
