Australia finally win the Border-Gavaskar Trophy

Australia have finally won the Border-Gavaskar Trophy after 10 years. It's weird to think, but Pat Cummins had never actually won this trophy. In fact, his comeback was right at the start of when Australia started losing to India all the time.

The rest of the senior core had won once, but right at the start. Then, they had to get used to losing over and over again. A decade without winning for a team that was winning quite a bit against everyone else.

Of course, it was often made much worse because these were the two best teams. But for this core, and specifically for Cummins, this was an absolutely huge win, because of everything that had come before it. They gave up chances to win. They lost two players because of building supplies. They had a massive collapse in the third innings. They completely messed it up on a wicket that they should have been very suited to.

India had been beating Australia for a very long time, until now.

Australia won in 2014, with quite a lot of this core, even if they didn't have Cummins at that time. But 2017 is where it all starts. It's also weirdly when Cummins makes his comeback—or, in a sense, his beginning—to Test Cricket. He had a little taste of Test Cricket, we didn't see him for about four prime ministers, and then he came back.

That series started with the Australian team complaining about how the wicket was against them and how they were really going to struggle. Then, they went and won that Test match on the back of an incredible hundred by Steve Smith and Steve O'Keefe taking a lot of wickets. The action shifted to Bengaluru, where Nathan Lyon took an eight-wicket haul. But Australia still managed to lose that game, partly because India did outplay them.

In Ranchi, the visitors made a lot of runs in the first innings, but it was a very flat wicket. They ended up having to hang on a little bit on day five, and it could have been quite a dangerous one. Finally, the series moved to Dharamshala with the series at 1-1. Australia had a huge chance of winning on probably one of the best wickets they were ever going to bowl on in India, but it was the Indian seamers who outbowled the Australian ones.

At the time, it didn't matter that much because they'd just lost that one series. But in hindsight, that was probably one of their biggest missed opportunities.

The next series was in Australia in 2018/19. For the Adelaide Test, they had one of the more remarkable batting orders that you'll ever see—Aaron Finch, Marcus Harris, Shaun Marsh and Peter Handscomb—not exactly household names when it comes to Test cricket, right? However, they only lost by 31 runs in that game, and looking back, they realistically had plenty of chances to win.

They did actually win the next one, which means that it was 1-1 after Perth. So they had a really good chance with two Tests to go. That was until they were smashed everywhere at the MCG. When they got to the SCG, India made over 600 in the first innings and enforced a follow-on in a rain-affected draw.

They had a huge chance after the first two, and then pretty much nothing at all when it comes to the last two. But, there is something worth remembering about this series. This is probably now known in some places as the 'asterisk series,' as they did not have Steve Smith and David Warner due to the sandpaper incident. That's why they had that funky batting lineup at the start of the series. They were trying to find batting anywhere they could, and essentially India were just a better side than them at that point.

There's another home series straight after in 2020/21. With two losses on the trot to India at this stage, I think Australia were a bit more fired up about playing them. Adelaide was probably the first Test we ever saw the reinforced Kookaburra seam. But India didn't see much of it because they were bowled out for 36, and that one was over.

At that stage, it looked like the entire series was over. It's incredible looking back, because Australia's opening batters at that stage were Matthew Wade and Joe Burns. Even though David Warner was back for the last two Tests, this was not a very stable Australian team.

In Melbourne, India came back with a really, really good victory on the back of a century by Ajinkya Rahane, which annoyed a lot of people who didn't like him. Then in Sydney, Australia had the better of the game, but that fourth innings from India was really something quite special. Looking back, they made a lot of runs, and especially Rishabh Pant's knock changed things a lot.

But this is mostly remembered for the Ashwin and Vihari partnership at the end, when they were sharing body armour and Ashwin couldn't move. And, of course, the famous line: 'Can't wait to get you to the Gabba, Ash.'

To be fair, Australia played good cricket and got themselves ahead all the way through at the Gabba. Unfortunately for them, India pulled off an incredible chase of over 300, and it was Rishabh Pant, Shubman Gill and Cheteshwar Pujara who played a massive role in the win. India had won a Test, and the entire series, with essentially net bowlers and backups, and without their stars. It was one of the most incredible wins in modern cricket history.

But one of the reasons it was so incredible was that it's not very often the home team goes one-nil up and still manages to lose the series, especially when they were ahead in the last two matches. Australia could have won that series 3-1, but ended up losing the entire series. It was an incredible effort from India, but you can imagine at that point, Australia would be like, "what on earth just happened?"

India were in the middle of their invincible phase in the 2023 series. The wickets were getting more and more treacherous for opposition batters. No one was expecting to make any runs. In the first Test, that's kind of what happened. The Australians weren't really even in that game. They lost by more than an innings.

The Delhi one is more interesting, because this could have changed the series quite a lot. After the first innings, they basically played out a stalemate. This was a second-innings shootout, and all Australia had to do was make a few runs. Australia made no runs. Even a decent total there, and I reckon they might have gotten over the line.

But they came back and won in Indore. This was maybe one of the first signs—after Pune in 2017—of India just making the wickets so variable that an opposition team could come in and steal one. Australia played really well in that final match, but unfortunately, it was such a flat wicket and there was no way that they were going to get a result. So, they ended up with an honourable 2-1 loss.

I think in 2017, they deserved more than 2-1, and in 2023, they were probably happy with 2-1. But you can only ever be so happy to keep losing to the same team over and over again, right? After that, they got to play them in the World Test Championship final.

This is quite an interesting match now, all things considered, because it's really upset India that they have lost twice. India haven't yet had a World Test Championship final in conditions that have suited them. They were probably the first major team to really focus on the World Test Championship. Yet, Australia came from nowhere, played some really good cricket, and outwitted them there.

But that wasn't the only final where Australia had defeated India. In the World Cup that same year, India were absolutely dominant all the way through. They got to the final, Australia came up with some good tactics, but India also really had an off day there. Suddenly, Australia had won twice.

You have this weird situation where this entire core has been losing to India all the way through, but then, when there were trophies on offer, they picked up two of them. In this period, India absolutely dominated all bilateral cricket, but the minute you put a trophy in front of them, they would lose.

There's absolutely no doubt, with the age of this core and the fact that you've already had some retirements like David Warner, that it meant a lot to Australia to beat India. But not just beat India; specifically, hold the fort at home. They can accept some of these losses because India have been so good in India, and they've still managed to win a couple of Test matches there. I'm not sure they can quite accept the series losses at home. They had more than a few opportunities to win in both of these series, and India played brilliantly—they wouldn't take that away from them—but they would be annoyed by that.

What's more remarkable by the day is that Perth Test match, right? Australia seemingly came in with all that momentum, and New Zealand had just beaten India at home. India didn’t just steal the Test match—they smashed the Test match. That was such a dominant win.

We always thought there'd be a bit of a comeback in the next game, with the pink-ball game being in Adelaide, but it still meant that we were 1-1 at that stage. Australia continued to dominate at the Gabba when they weren't being drowned out by the rain. But if you think back to the end of that Gabba Test, India had actually got themselves into a position to steal that match from nowhere. If it hadn't rained on the final day, that could have been an incredible game. Either way, no one got the result there.

At tea on day five at the MCG, you would have said we were going to see the same thing. Australia had dominated, but India had fought their way back into a decent position. Maybe not to win the game, but at least to put some pressure on Australia. It was very unlikely that Australia would win with seven wickets required. But that's exactly what happened.

If you look at the rest of all these series, that sort of thing hadn't been happening before. Australia had put themselves in positions to win, but they hadn't gone on to win them when they needed to. That MCG Test was the difference.

We get a very different SCG from the last two times. In fact, this SCG is like nothing I had ever seen before. This was an absolute arm-wrestle Test. And just to the point when the hands are at their sweatiest in the arm-wrestle, what happens? Jasprit Bumrah gets injured. It certainly made things a lot easier for Australia in the fourth innings chase.

Mohammed Shami never even got in the country, let alone on the field. We saw snippets and highlights of him bowling, but he was never more than a dream for this series. Bumrah got all the way through the series, and when there was a chance of stealing a drawn series at the end, that's when his body finally gave out. He basically gave everything he had, and there was nothing left.

Steve Smith made two hundreds, which is more than Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma did combined. By the end of the series, Rohit wasn't even in the team anymore. He was also on a paternity leave for the first Test. Virat was there the whole time, but he barely made any runs in the series apart from the third-innings hundred in Perth.

India never went in with a lineup of four frontline seamers at any stage. To be fair, neither did Australia, and they still did pretty well. Perhaps the main difference here was Scott Boland. Australia lost Josh Hazlewood, who really only played a Test and a half in this series. It didn't matter because of what Scott Boland did. He was probably the second-best bowler in the series after Bumrah, and he was Australia's fourth-choice seamer.

India used five frontline seamers all the way through, and they never got anything out of their third seamer position. Australia whipped Boland in, and it was completely different.

If you look at the four series before this, there were many times when Australia could have drawn or even gone on to win a series, but something went against them. This time, it was all about the things that went wrong for India.

All things considered, there really isn't that much between these two teams over the last decade. There is no doubt that Australia definitely deserved to win at least one Border-Gavaskar Trophy.