Third day’s play at Adelaide saw the scores of Indian batsmen reading like a telephone number: 4, 9, 2, 0, 4, 0, 8, 4, 0, 4, 1

At the end of the day, there was shock, disbelief, disappointment. Having had the better of the exchange with hosts Australia during the first couple of days of the Adelaide day-night Test, suddenly, it seemed, the knees of the Indian batting line-up crumbled and the entire team collapsed in the course of amassing a miniscule total of 36 runs. The team, however, did manage to create a dubious record: Its lowest ever total in Test matches. India started its quest to repeat the 2018-19 historic feat against Australia in their own backyard in the worst possible manner when the pace attack led by Josh Hazlewood demolished Indian batting within 15.2 overs on the third morning of the game. Before the game, there was a lot of hype around Indians’ handling of the Oz pace troika of Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood under lights with Kookabura pink ball and, for the first two days, India was 53 runs ahead after the first essay but what happened on Saturday was completely unbelievable. No one could have imagined India getting out in just one session; that too from the position where it looked like dominating the proceedings. What India was supposed to do on the third day was to just keep the scoreboard ticking, bat the entire day and build on the lead. But before anything of that sort could happen, Australia showed why they are a team to fear. Hazlewood, who has often drawn comparisons with Aus legend Glenn McGrath for his on-the-spot bowling, produced the most iconic spell of modern times which forced Indian batsman to commit same mistakes repeatedly and it was quite visible on the scoreboard as well, with four of his five scalps coming in an identical fashion (caught behind by Tim Paine, in what looked like an action replay of the previous wicket). And to complement him, there was Pat Cummins, who got rid of two best batsmen — Virat Kohli and Cheteshwar Pujara — to set the stage. The way Indian batsmen failed to answer any of the questions posed by the Aussie bowlers will certainly create a moment of panic in the Indian dressing room as now they have to do it without skipper Virat Kohli, who is returning to India, and this makes the task a lot more complicated.

With Kohli not available for the rest of the series and an injured Shami ruled out, India has plenty of questions to answer and the biggest of all is who’ll take the initiative to not just lift the team’s mood but also show the intent to take on the feisty Kangaroos. A morale-boosting win of this stature will not only give Australians the belief to take revenge of the last series’ humiliation but will also cause more insecurity in the Indian team’s dressing room as there was not one particular batsman to be blamed but it was a collective failure, yet again. Save the 2018 series in Australia, the Indian team has had way too many batting collapses including six on the trot, starting with New Zealand early this year, when it suffered a 0-2 whitewash. The score of 36 is not something that is expected from the Indian batting line-up but when Indian skipper during the post-match conference urged people not to “make a mountain out of a molehill”, it certainly raised a lot of eyebrows. The last time India toured Oz and won the first series Down Under in 71 years, the Indian skipper himself rated it as “bigger than a World Cup win for us”. So now that the team has done something which no other team of the past did, why this attitude?