Australia’s fortress has lost its aura but history weighs heavy on the tourists

It’s passing strange. In town ahead of the Australia-India Test, Brisbane feels as it always has: guys walking down Queen Street carrying boxes of mangoes, the Queensland humidity performing its ritual of luxuriant suffocation as the city’s air begrudgingly shifts along the snake-path of the river. The Gabba Test though, does not feel quite the same.

For three decades and more, this was where Australian teams were unbeatable. Pointed out with a heavy drumbeat of symbolism, the previous visiting winner was the great West Indies team of 1988. It took the best ever to achieve this feat, was the message. But that’s not the case any more.

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It was India four years ago who broke the spell, in a monster chase built on Cheteshwar Pujara’s threshold for pain and Rishabh Pant’s threshold for audacity. Two years later, South Africa lost in two days but could just as easily have won in two, on a lottery pitch that crashed Australia to four wickets down chasing 34. Then in January this year, the far weaker modern West Indies had their throwback moment, young unknown Shamar Joseph on nine toes ripping up the home team to deny a chase they should have ambled.

None of which means that Australia won’t win in the coming five days, or that five days will even be required. It’s to say that the possibility of things going differently is tangible, not just a hopeful dream. India will know they can win, if they can get their batting right. The “if” is enormous, but so is the potential prize, a series lead ahead of the Melbourne and Sydney fixtures that should suit them far better than the three engagements that came before.

Another thing that has changed is the Gabba’s place in the order of proceedings. In Australia – a country with the longest human civilisation and the shortest memory – doing something twice makes it tradition. So Brisbane being the first Test of the season came to be seen as immovable, eternal, despite all the seasons when it wasn’t. Teams visiting here to be trounced before they had even distinguished Vulture Street from Stanley was the expected way of the world.

Brisbane is seldom first any more, and won’t be for at least the next five seasons under Cricket Australia’s scheduling plan. The change, much as it might upset some people’s internal seasonal compass, means that we now get Gabba Tests with genuine context. Being first meant that the only question of interest was whether a touring team could get enough rain or a flat enough pitch to escape with a draw. Now we begin Brisbane with two teams locked at 1-1, and far more reason to tune in.

The third change is that this Test is back before Christmas. The winning decades tended to have Tests in November or December. Australia’s two losses here in the last four years were both well into January, after the summer’s heat had another month or two to batter the deck. Whether that makes a difference is something that only a curator can say, but it might. Those January Tests were different even before the result made them so.

Josh Hazlewood has been passed fit to play, with a fine Gabba record starting on debut with his 5 for 68 against India a decade ago. Pat Cummins too has a markedly better record here than his career numbers. A return to earlier scheduling might mean a return to the historical mean, with Australia’s fast bowlers taking down a batting order unsuited to pace, bounce and movement.

That is what will be expected, on a pitch as green as an Irish cliché. But Brisbane strips can be misleading by appearance, as various visitors have learned to their cost. Often the colour is cosmetic, and as per one purpose of cosmetics, can hide a plainer reality. Plenty of Gabba Tests have been defined by the slow grind of batting for days rather than the quick burst of fast bowling.

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If it is conducive to the faster arts, Australia have their own two problems: a currently flaky batting order and facing Jasprit Bumrah. Like India learned to their cost on spinning tracks against New Zealand recently, home conditions with too much bowling venom can poison your own batting as much as the opposition’s. So much depends on how that one strip of grass behaves, and as history teaches those who will read it, no amount of studying the records can help us predict that.