Crisis averted. Panic stations cleared. All units stand down. Australian cricket fans pressed every big red button they could find after India dealt a blow in Perth, but the Australian team pressed the big pink button in Adelaide. A different kind of beating balanced the five-game series. It lasted less than two and a half days, not even a third night – less than seven Sessions – for Australia’s bowlers picking India apart on either side of Travis Head’s hundred. A 10-wicket win that made Sunday afternoon free for all.

In hindsight it cannot be said that some of the dire reactions to Perth – threatening whitewashing, constant changing of the guard, scrapping the team to be sold for spare parts – were exaggerated. This Australian configuration has achieved a lot in difficult situations over several years and is still of high quality. It’s also true that some of these players are underperforming, that the team has vulnerabilities, and that properly timing a team’s transition requires a cascade of decisions that can be made right or very wrong.

But even before their arrival in Adelaide and after the result in Perth, an Australian victory in the second Test seemed the much more likely outcome given their experience and record with the pink ball, including the way they handled India with it destroyed the year 2020. As of now This record reads: played 12, lost one, that was the match when Shamar Joseph stole it in the last gasp in Brisbane.

So things fell as the numbers would suggest: Mitchell Starc blitzed six wickets in the first innings, Pat Cummins five in the second, Scott Boland was useful throughout as a quick replacement with two for and three for and spinner Nathan Lyon needed one for one over in the game. Luck in terms of timing played no role – they beat India in daylight on the first day and in darkness on the second night.

The bowling was so toxic that it made up for a perennial weakness of this team, which relies on one player’s big score to salvage an otherwise stalled innings. Travis Head has been the Baywatch star several times in this series, as has Cameron Green in Wellington in March and Mitchell Marsh twice against Pakistan last summer.

Starting on the last day, when the clock ticked to 2:30 p.m. local time. India had five wickets in hand and were still 29 points behind. It all relied on his pyrotechnic wicketkeeper Rishabh Pant to break a score and try to give Australia a 100-chase. But it was Starc who ended that distant ambition in the first over of the day, pushing the ball away from the left-hander to hand his lead to Steve Smith.

That was Starc’s eighth and final dismissal – four more overs brought him no closer to a ten-wicket match, although Smith missed a bigger chance from Nitish Kumar Reddy that would have made it nine. Instead, the task was handed to Cummins to loosen up the lower order with short bowling, fending off catches from Ravichandran Ashwin and Harshit Rana before Reddy uppercutted into the deep. Boland finished the ball when Travis Head duly took the ski catch from his new nemesis Mohammed Siraj.

So we go to Brisbane together while Australia is happy again. But the anomaly of the day-night format means that the results here may not mean much when they arrive elsewhere. India’s batting performance has shown that they can beat Australia’s bowling on simpler surfaces and there are days when the modern Gabba can easily score. Jasprit Bumrah will always be a threat, spin hasn’t played a role yet but it will play a role at some point. Possibilities. are in abundance. If you focus too much on any of these, you’re likely to be led astray