Nathan Lyon does his bit

Nathan Lyon has found the challenge of India's batsmen a vexing one, but on the most spin-friendly pitch of the summer rewards have started to arrive. In the first innings Lyon did for VVS Laxman at the end of a tidy spell, and in the second he nabbed Sachin Tendulkar and Laxman again to follow up the dismissal of Virender Sehwag.

He was counselled to try something a little higher and loopier in the morning to tempt the opener's hungry eyes. Those words came from Ricky Ponting, who turned out to be the man who took the catch when Sehwag's hearty swing across the line resulted in a skier and his wicket.

Both Tendulkar and Laxman were playing their final Test innings in Australia, but Lyon had subsisted on too meagre a diet of wickets to roll out any kind of red carpet for the duo. Tendulkar's wicket was a source of particular joy, as it arrived in classical fashion: the flight and loop landed the ball short of his defensive push, the spin and bounce taking it up onto glove, pad and into short leg's hands.

Lyon spent much of his afternoon bowling around the wicket, an angle he has favoured for considerable stretches of his young Test career, drifting the ball across the right-handers then spinning it back down the line of the stumps. The trace of footmarks left by the left-armer Zaheer Khan on a deteriorating pitch also provided encouragement for Lyon, and his captain Michael Clarke.

Lyon has observed it all as an Australian cricketer, not as part of the ground staff he had worked with in last summer's corresponding Test match against England.