Australia vs India: How India reversed its fortunes

The final Test match of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy between India and Australia is currently underway at the Sydney Cricket Ground. The Indian team was up by 2-1 margin in this four-match Test series, going into this match. The Indians have already ensured that they will be retaining the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, as the Australians cannot win the series anymore.

However, this Sydney Test still holds great significance in the context of Indian cricket history, as India is on the verge of a first Test series victory in Australia.

The team has started off brilliantly in this all-important final Test match. Their batsmen have put up a humongous total of 622 runs on the board. This total makes it almost certain, that India will not lose this match and hence complete their first ever Test series victory in Australia.

We look at the main things that the Indian team did right in this tour, compared to its previous two recent overseas tours of England and South Africa, which resulted in this turnaround.

Team India

The main reason behind India's excellent performance in the ongoing series is that the youngsters like Jasprit Bumrah, Mayank Agarwal and Rishabh Pant have come up and produced match-winning performances alongside experienced players like Cheteshwar Pujara, Virat Kohli, Ishant Sharma, and Mohammad Shami.

Thus the Indian team has not been over-reliant on individuals for winning the matches. Rather they had different match winners in different test matches.

This is what they failed to do in the previous two overseas series in England and South Africa. In both the series, the team was over-dependent on Virat Kohli and the pace trio for producing winning performances.

Although Kohli and the pace bowlers played exceptionally well in both the series, but the team was unable to produce desired results. This once again proved that cricket is a team game and for consistent success of the team, all the players need to contribute.

The New Stars: Hanuma Vihari and Mayank Agarwal

In the previous English and South African tours, the team management persisted with mainstays like Murali Vijay, Dinesh Karthik, KL Rahul, and Shikhar Dhawan over the young and in form players like Prithvi Shaw, Rishabh Pant and Hanuma Vihari for a major part of the series.

The team management expected that the past experience of playing in overseas conditions will help the experienced players to perform better. However, this tactic backfired since most of them were out of form and hence low in confidence. They were unable to deliver, in spite of getting repeated chances.

In this Australian series also, the initial team selection for the test series had a similar tendency of choosing players based on experience rather than their recent form. As a result, the likes of Vijay, Rahul, Parthiv and Rohit Sharma got into the side ahead of young in-form players like Agarwal.

However, after the failure of the experienced openers in the first two matches, the team management did not repeat the mistake of persisting with them. Instead, they brought in the likes of Vihari and Agarwal in the playing XI. This move of inducting the inform fresh youngsters in the playing XI proved to be a masterstroke.

Agarwal grasped his opportunity with both hands and scored crucial runs against the new ball, thus providing the middle order an ideal platform to pile up a huge total. This finally helped the Indians to beat the Aussies convincingly in the third Test and be in a dominant position in the final test.