ON Sunday (February 19) morning, India entered the day with their spinners being put under rare pressure at home.

Australia’s furious start had left them rattled, and the visitors started with a distinct advantage having already enjoyed their best day on tour so far. And there was an even lesser indication that they would crumble as dramatically as they did, losing four wickets for 0 runs at one point.

The trigger did not start with just R Ashwin getting the better of the dangerous-looking Travis Head in the first over. Rather, it was started by the offspinner, beginning to work around a different line of attack against the likes of Marnus Labuschagne and Steve Smith.

It was an intriguing period of play with Ashwin pulling out of his action multiple times, presumably to spot the batter’s movements for the non-strikers weren’t straying out. Soon enough Labuschagne played with his line from the stumps to play a deft paddle sweep for a boundary, and as Ashwin continued from the round-the-wicket angle he also brought out a reverse sweep for good measure.

Rohit Sharma, after the day’s play, said that he felt that his spinners had panicked a little on the previous day. “Yesterday, we bowled about 12 overs and they were 62 [61] which is more than 5.5 [5.05] runs an over.

I could see that we were panicking a bit, trying to change fields way too many times. In the morning, we wanted to tell those three spinners, ‘keep it calm and we don’t need to change fields, we don’t need to change fields as often as we did last evening’,” he’d say. (Cricbuzz).