At the end-of-the-day press conference, one of the scribes posed a rather relevant question to Simon Katich, who had come to represent his team there. It had been a puzzle that many had tried to decipher through the day’s play, but none had been able to; why had the Aussies not gone after the Indian bowling and taken it on, despite been 0-1 down in the series. It wouldn’t have taken too many boundaries to leak through the on-side for the Indian skipper to change things around and normalcy could just have been restored after that.

The moot point here was that the Aussies are trailing the Indians, and to accentuate this problem, they would need to bat last on a surface that is not improving by any stretch of imagination. Yet, there was no sense of urgency from their end to take the bull by its horns and get to within touching distance of the Indian total. Instead, the runs came as much in trickles as the global liquidity of today’s day and age, and the tourists struggled to only 166 runs in almost 86 overs they faced through the day!

Katich’s reply was a rather astounding, “This is the most stupid question I have heard”!

Now, does that imply that the Australian counter-strategy was to continue batting the way they did till the Indian bowlers tired out, and begun to resume their normal lines and lengths? If that was what the tactic of the men from Down Under was, then one must agree that it wasn’t a defensive move, but something that was smacked in either total confusion or one that lacked any clear direction.

Quite clearly, the Aussies had been surprised. A highly potent dosage of their own medicine that they had forced onto India in 2004 had been very slyly – and intelligently – used on them, and before they even realised what had transpired, it had already happened.