Friday, October 17: Nearly caught a plane to Mohali this evening to watch the Test over the weekend. A connected friend promised me great seats and lodgings in Mohali itself. But the main reason for going was to watch Sehwag open, and once Dhoni won the toss, that wasn’t likely to happen so I settled for Neo Sports. There’s an oddly perky, extremely young man who anchors the pre-game show; innocent of both cricket and syntax, his function must be to make Ian Chappell and Mohinder Amarnath look even older than they are.

I see Sehwag and Gambhir off to a decent start before leaving to teach. Kumble’s injured; we’ll see what Amit Mishra can do. Still think it should have been Piyush Chawla. After the first lecture, I read (yes, read) typed commentary on Cricinfo: 141 for 1. I smoke an illegal cigarette and feel contented. Dravid’s just hit four fours in eight typed sentences, each FOUR keyboarded in capitals. No radio commentary for a Test series between the two best teams in the world. Come back AIR, all is forgiven, even the “VSNL chaukka, Connecting India!” commercial after every boundary. Suresh Saraya is better than radio silence. Radio made Test cricket an immersion: it followed you in the ether wherever you went. No radio commentary and no people in Mohali’s brilliant stadium seem to suggest the end of mass interest in the long game.

By the time I drove home after lunch, the usual mid-innings collapse has happened. My father-in-law and I tremble, but then the basic dross of this Oz team shines through. Tendulkar is brisk, Ganguly is careful (he is also out, only Rudi didn’t call for the stumping replay. How does he stay on the umpire’s panel?).

One Peter Siddle debuts and stuns Gambir by bouncing the ball off his helmet first up. He has very short hair and white, zinced lips and looks man-made. He gets Tendulkar edging to slip for 88; that must have been the seventh or eighth century Sachin’s missed out on in the last couple of years.

Saturday, October 18: 469/10. Daft Rudi pulls out another slow-mo blunder. Dhoni lbw 92. He was a stump outside off-stump and playing a shot. Luckily, Zaheer’s just bowled Hayden; cleaned up the brute. Zero for one!

We could have done with 500 but there’s a nice consistency to the batting card: a sixty (Gambhir), two thirties (Dravid, Sehwag), an eighty (Tendulkar), a ninety (Dhoni) and a hundred (Ganguly). Dhoni makes bowlers consider wearing helmets: he hit White, Australia’s token slow bowler, straight back at him, head-high. White pretended to catch the ball, while sensibly letting it bullet past him. The pull and the hook that Dhoni started with have had my blood pumping ever since, specially that flat six off Lee. He’s a remarkable player: a thinking axe-man.

They’re letting schoolchildren in to fill the empty stadium — which is sensible. Girls in salwar-kameez uniforms and georgette chunnis, sitting in rows on sunlit terraces, eating horizontally held orange bars as they watch the match shift and change.

Zaheer and Ishant have designated bunnies: Hayden and Ponting, respectively. Ishant’s just knocked Ponting over and he had to do it twice. Rudi K. didn’t give Ponting out when he was plumb in front (HawkEye had the ball hitting leg-and-middle, four inches below the bails), so two balls later Ishant did it all over again. Ponting, typically, had the gall to linger.

Zaheer’s bowling is full of business: hiding the ball in the hand, placing it just so in the bowling hand at the last moment, using the scrambled seam to rough up the ball for reverse swing... And then there’s the aggro: he’s just menaced Hussey. Unlike Ishant, Zaheer menaces with conviction. It helps if you look rugged. When Ishant eyeballs batsmen, he looks like a shaggy broom with an agitated Adam’s apple. But he’s fast enough not to need theatre: he’s just bowled one at 147 kmph.

Sivaramakrishnan finally says something that makes sense: the Australians are 22/2 in 13 overs. The real Australian team (missing from this tour) would have attacked its way out of trouble. Not Hussey and Katich. But give the bowlers credit: Zaheer and Ishant are the best opening pair India’s ever had.

Amit Mishra comes on. Old-style Indian slow bowler: soft, slightly pear-shaped. Nearly has Hussey lbw right away. Spins his leg-breaks, not his googlies so much. Slow, slow, bowler.

He does have a spinning wrong ’un! Goes round the wicket, makes the ball straighten and has Michael Clarke trapped in front. Golden Boy’s out on the last ball of the day, two matches running. Why is he, in the Australian scheme of things, the Anointed One? Maybe baby-faced blonds are prized in a team that specializes in craggy veterans? Why doesn’t Hussey get anything like as enthusiastic a press?

Actually, I have a theory about that. It’s because Hussey doesn’t complete his shots. There’s no follow-through, no moment of rest where the stroke becomes a pretty ‘still’ in the spectator’s mind. And the reason for that is that Hussey wants to take off for that single at once, every single ball, so the shot segues into the sprint start and he ends up looking like a committed, hard-working journeyman, a labourer, which is desperately unfair for someone who is (just say it!) a great batsman.

Sunday, October 19: Hussey gets a fifty before Ishant gets him. Now we have the new, down-market Australia at the wicket: Shane Watson and Brad Haddin. I remember Australian commentators and journalists talking blithely about Haddin filling Gilchrist’s shoes. You’d have to be blind and drunk to think that thought.

Bhajji’s got him. Lovely off-spinner’s dismissal: tossed up ball, poor Haddin lunges forward to drive, misses, and the ball takes the off-bail. Watson’s hit four boundaries in his 19 runs and every one of them in the region of third man. Mishra drifts one into Watson, it pitches outside leg and spins right across Watson’s considerable width, missing everything, including the off-stump. Then he bamboozles Cameron White with his googly and bowls him. How does Kumble get back into this team for the Delhi Test?

During lunch Border talks to the studio experts from mid-pitch. It feels strange. Here we are, watching a contest for the Border-Gavaskar trophy and both Border and Gavaskar are working the waves, making money out of a competition that commemorates them. The now-ignored convention that you only raise statues to dead men was intended precisely to avoid this sort of icky weirdness.

Border has an interesting take on the death of the follow-on. Says it’s a function of the death of the rest-day. Without a day off, captains are reluctant to make their bowlers toil for two consecutive innings. This is plausible, but is it historically true? Couldn’t the real cause be something contingent, like Australia’s defeat in Calcutta after making India follow-on in 2001. This, given the Indian passion for paternity, would make Laxman the Father of the Dead Follow-On.

They’re finally gone for 268, 201 behind, but the follow-on remains dead. India will bat. Mishra’s taken five! He’s a revelation: a slow, orthodox leggie who tosses it up, gets drift, has a googly that turns and can deal with being hit. Remember, this wasn’t a turner he was bowling on.

Sehwag and Gambhir put on a quick hundred partnership. I allow myself to hope.

Monday, October 20: When Sehwag’s out in his nineties, Dhoni promotes himself over Dravid and Tendulkar and then promotes Ganguly over them too. This is the thing about him: he doesn’t have a deferential bone in his body. And then he gets the runs, just to let you know he wasn’t grandstanding. Gambhir makes his century: he’s played wonderfully through this series. I was wrong about him: I was convinced he didn’t have the technique to be an opener, but he’s put the runs on the board. Dhoni declares soon after.

This happens in the morning at university, so I have to read the start of the Australian innings on Cric-info, as the openers gallop off the blocks with Hayden having a go at everything. In the auto-rickshaw going home, I think to myself that Kumble, like earlier Indian captains, would have made sure of not losing by stretching the lead closer to 600. So would I, in their place. When I get home, joy is large. Harbhajan has knocked the frenzied openers over. I watch Hussey do hara-kiri, pulling at a ball from Harbhajan that keeps low and has him lbw. Then Ishant makes my day by jagging the ball in and knocking over Ponting and Watson. By close of play, Golden Boy Clarke and Haddin have built a little partnership by attacking Mishra. Dhoni shouts calm encouragement: “Marne de, jitna marna hai!”

Normally, even with a lead of 350 runs, a day in hand and only five wickets to take, I’d worry for India. I am, after all, an Indian fan, and I’ve learnt to manage expectations. But watching Dhoni, I feel reassured. There is, after decades, a grown-up in charge. I let myself think the thought without touching wood: We’ll win on Tuesday.

Tuesday, October 21: We win on Tuesday. By the most runs ever. Before lunch. Scratch Obama and McCain. Dhoni for President.