India need a first-innings fix, and quickly

Indian cricket, for the longest time, has been riding on the shoulders of its batters. They are the big draw cards. The crowd-pullers. The game-breakers. The reason why work gets delayed or kids cut school. But they're having a little bit of trouble right now.

This tour of Australia has presented difficult conditions for them. It has pitted them against a fast-bowling attack capable of holding its own in any era. And it's demanded they cope with not just the events that take place on the field but the drama that is forever brewing off it. There is also one other challenge: the first innings.

Over the last five years, Australia has been the toughest place to score runs as an away team to set up a Test match. In 24 games, visiting batters have averaged just 21.75 across first innings with only two centuries - Jonny Bairstow's 113 in Sydney the 2021-22 Ashes and Ajinkya Rahane's 112 in Melbourne in the 2020-21 Border-Gavaskar Trophy. India were able to play catch-up quite nicely in Perth but Adelaide turned out very differently.

So now, with the series locked at 1-1, the most crucial thing for India is to start a lot better with the bat. This season they've only scored one hundred in the first innings. R Ashwin's against Bangladesh in Chennai. There have been 16 ducks.

Conditions have played a part in that. There have been situations like the first innings against New Zealand in Bengaluru where almost nothing seemed to work. Rohit Sharma brought that up when he tried to explain why he isn't too worried just yet about his team's batting performances. He refused to entertain the notion that defeat in less than seven sessions of cricket was scarring.

The India captain had a difficult return to the XI, going into a pink-ball game - which they don't play very often - a little low on prep and suffering two single-digit scores. It felt like he had done the right thing, moving down to the middle order, both for himself and for the team, but whatever little advantage that they thought they were eking out still wasn't enough.

Watching Rohit almost being dismissed twice in the same innings - India's second gig in Adelaide - which in the end was only 15 balls long, on the back of his struggles during the home season, when he made only one fifty in 10 innings, and remembering the other Rohit who went to England in 2021 and displayed excellent judgment of length and an incredible awareness about using soft hands makes it feel like something has gone missing from his game. Potentially the something that made him better at dealing with bowler-friendly conditions. Things that are lost can still be found though.

Virat Kohli, as he has often been in the good times, is right there alongside his friend, in this tough one. He's averaging 10 in the first innings from seven matches in the 2024-25 season; that's a personal low. Rohit is averaging 8.66 in the first innings from six matches in the 2024-25 season. That would've been his personal low too if not for 2015-16, when he made three first-innings runs in two Tests against South Africa on extremely spin-friendly pitches.

Kohli's ability to raise his game to overcome any perils out in the middle is the stuff of legend. He'd shown glimpses of that even last year on tour in South Africa, weathering fiery spells from Kagiso Rabada with relative ease and creating the illusion that somehow he always had time to get behind the ball even on those fast and bouncy tracks. He didn't make any big scores, but he looked really good in defence. Over here, and against New Zealand before this, he didn't. The hundred in Perth came on a flat pitch against flagging bowlers - and in India's second innings.

Yashasvi Jaiswal has credit in the bank after his 161 in Perth but he is yet to get off the mark in the first innings this series.

Shubman Gill looked good at training in Canberra in between Tests, in the practice game that followed, then in training in Adelaide and pretty much all the way up to the time he was dismissed in the Test match. He flattered to deceive.

Even when they were winning, India's top order sometimes had trouble putting up the runs that were expected of them, but their allrounders would step in and quickly fix things. Home comforts helped there. They are not available here.

The switch to the red ball in Brisbane should come as a boost to India, in that they are back in more familiar territory. But if the batters do not do more in their first innings, this entire series might just devolve into Jasprit Bumrah vs Australia instead of India vs Australia.