Australia Blinks, Bangladesh Winks

GH thinks

Strictly speaking, the toss in a Test match should not matter so much. Pitches are prepared to generally higher standards. The duration of games ensures a variety of conditions. Choice of innings is more like playing white in chess than pole position on the grid.

Yet it stubbornly goes on mattering, sometimes in terms of the path not taken. Australia’s attack will hardly be better placed in the next year - rested, fit and hungry as their all-you-can-eat twenty-one-Test buffet begins. They eyed a tasty Bangladeshi batting line-up, recently rissoled in Harare before being chewed up and spat out in the tour match, and a drop-in pitch of unknown propensities. Yet when the coin fell his way, Pat Cummins mildly elected to bat. This was the practical and conventional decision; but it also offered the visitors a chink of light, through which they squeezed: at the close, Bangladesh trailed by only 102 runs with nine first-innings wickets in hand.

Bat first, yeah mate

For Australia had not batted in a Test for 217 days, and it felt like longer - in modern cricket terms, aeons ago. In this game, too, you often like to think you’re ready, but aren’t quite. In the event, Australia’s top three could find no rhythm, perhaps chafing to get started, probing and pushing as though through the cobwebs in an overgrown garden. A decent thatch of grass and cover of cloud, plus some residual moisture, made for bowling conditions more inviting than had seemed possible in the sunlit early morn. Thick inside edges accumulated. The outfield was verdant but slow. Against pace bowlers who made up for in persistence what they lacked in ball speed, especially the skiddy and skilful Hasan Mahmud, batting was work not pleasure. Was there quite the willingness to embrace this, with an eye to easier conditions to come?