Compelling theatre has its pantomime moments

There were scattered moments throughout the most intriguing day of what already stands as a compelling series between India and Australia that verged upon pantomime of the absurd.

For example, when Steve Smith jammed down on one of those deliveries from Ishant Sharma that bounced from the Chinnaswamy pitch with all the spring of a house brick and the Australia skipper bellowed 'noooo' lest his batting partner Matt Renshaw think the chance of a rare run was on offer.

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Which prompted Ishant to respond with his best impersonation of an Edvard Munch painting, his mocking, wide-eyed 'nooo' sending his captain Virat Kohli into paroxysms of laughter at slip.

Like when Kohi waved his arms and clapped his hands over his hand like the warm-up artist at the recording of a TV show, exhorting the crowd to rally behind his boys as they searched for a breakthrough.

Then there was the exaggerated reaction of the India captain and his star bowler Ravi Ashwin when Renshaw planted his gangling frame between Ashwin and the ball that had been punched back down the pitch by Smith, facing his first delivery of the day.

Image Id: 43E8B70C0BE545EEADE42EDC31DFE9D9 Image Caption: Renshaw and Ashwin collide at the non-striker's end // BCCI

It was not so much a deliberate blocking manoeuvre as the 20-year-old's inability to daintily place himself anywhere else.

But it sparked a running verbal battle among the four protagonists that ultimately led to Kohli routinely querying whether Renshaw – forced to retire ill during the previous Test (aptly in Pune) due to the sudden onset of tummy turbulence – required another comfort stop.

However, in the vast stretches of quite enthralling activity that stretched either side of those music hall moments there lived a day of Test cricket that stood as a captivating throwback to the enduring game's sweat-soaked past.

One of those days that Renshaw would only know from a study of archive footage, and which the Marsh brothers Shaun and Mitchell would have learned about first-hand from their dad, Geoff, who fought on the front line.

That era when Australia teams found themselves cannon fodder for the battery of West Indies quicks who pounded away at them, reluctant to cede their quarry so much as a run let alone a hint of friendly competition.

On day two at Bengaluru, the fire Australia's batters stared down was not so much a threat to their persons as to their pride.

In an era when batters feel put upon if they're unable to find runs at a rate of four an over, India's pair of scarcely express seamers and their couple of ever-threatening spinners kept Australia to barely a quarter of that pace and in a constant fight for survival.

Not by targeting their bodies in a manner that made traditional stroke play impossible, as was the combat plan of the West Indies in their pomp, but by landing the ball relentlessly in the right spot on a pitch that was doing much of the dirty work for them.

By refusing to offer any consistency in bounce, in pace, in degrees of turn, or in applications of logic.

A step beyond even the deck served up in Pune that was rated as ‘poor' by the match referee, but at least consistently offered negligible bounce and over-zealous turn from the opening over of a Test that was done and dusted inside three days.

"Just the variety of different types of spin," Renshaw explained at day's end, when trying to pinpoint how a pitch that was described as a ‘typical Bangalore batting deck' and ‘getting even better on day two' by some learned Indian judges was tougher than Test one.

"Some are turning quite a lot, some are not turning as much, some are going on with the angle.

"It's trying to play for the one that doesn't turn and then if it goes past the bat it goes past the bat.

"But it's probably a bit harder against the quicks because it's not bouncing as much, or some are going up.

"I think that challenge is the biggest."

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Renshaw knows better than most the unique skills that will be required to fashion a win on a surface that will produce a result as surely as on-field tensions will flare again before that point is reached.

He survived on it longer than any other Australia batter, and almost as long as India's lone hand on day one KL Rahul, who is a native of the Karnataka capital and therefore knows the vagaries of this pitch as well as anyone.

The Australians accepted this was not going to be a theatre for virtuosos even before they left their hotel to resume their batting innings in the morning.

There were whispered suggestions in the breakfast room that Chinnaswamy, renowned for its true pitches and evenly fought Test battles, had somehow served up a surface even more challenging than Pune's.

And when their captain Steve Smith went to the middle within half an hour of the day starting, he tried to impose his own sense of order on the chaos in the same way those uniformed Bengaluru traffic cops in their white slouch hats try to instil sense into the city's anarchic traffic.

Smith wielding his bat in the manner of the bamboo lathi, which remains the feared administrator of rough justice on the streets of India.

The Australia skipper waved his like a bullfighter's cape to safely usher potentially dangerous deliveries past his person.

He held it aloft like Gandalf the Grey's magical staff as an instruction to Renshaw to remain rooted to the non-striker's end, and even emblematically at his India opponents that he – like the Helms Deep ravine – was not to be easily crossed.

But after almost an hour-and-a-half of toil the likes of which he has rarely exerted as a Test batsman, Smith succumbed to the demons of the wicket and was gone with just eight to his name.

The fact that only one batter, Mitchell Marsh – lucklessly trapped lbw by a grubber – scored less gives a fair assessment of how pluckily the other Australians scrapped.

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Backing the reliability of the defensive games they have drilled themselves to improve, making the most of every false stroke that fortuitously found a gap in the encircling field, seizing on those very few loose deliveries like they were parcels from home.

It resembled, at times, those long-gone days of trench warfare, where gains were measured not in strides but in barely discernible increments until – with just over an hour of battle remaining in the day – the visitors nudged their noses in front.

Knowing they must return to the combat zone tomorrow to consolidate their 48-run advantage, and somehow convert it into something approaching unassailable.

In the knowledge that, as tough as batting has been over the first two days, it would make a mockery of both history and logic to expect the game to get any easier henceforth.

Although, as befitting a day punctuated by occasional outbreaks of thigh-slapping levity, that view is not universally shared.

"It got better, when I was batting in the first session yesterday," said India's Cheteshwar Pujara – who laboured 102 minutes to make 17 when the pitch was closest to pristine on the first morning – when asked how this pitch might play out.

"And Rahul told me that the wicket was getting easier to bat on.

"That is something we were expecting in the second innings.

"If the wicket does get better, we will obviously get a big total on the board (in the second innings)."

Something that sounds dangerously close to fantasy given India have thus far failed to manage three times from as many attempts.