Timing is everything as India change Australia Test venue at last minute

A s a foreigner visiting India, you can be confounded by an unfamiliar approach to time. A bus hasn’t arrived, a wifi network is down, you’re waiting on a piece of equipment, and you want to know how long. One genre of answer involves a cosmically flexible five minutes. Another invokes a vague future marker: after lunch, night time, ask again tomorrow. Far from rigid western ideas of timekeeping, something to it is more philosophy than organisation: so much of human perseverance is based on the thought that in the morning, things might be better.

The shrug of the shoulders approach applies at the top of cricket administration as much as it does at street level. Last minute is business as usual. When England hosted the 2019 World Cup, the fixture came out 13 months ahead of time. Australia’s version last year gave nearly 11 months’ notice. India’s T20 World Cup in 2021 didn’t have a fixture until two months out. That one had to contend with the pandemic and a move to the UAE, but their 2016 edition didn’t, and it was even later in announcing its dates. India events drive the planning department at the ICC to distraction.

So it is little surprise to have a mid-series venue change announced for the ongoing Australian Test tour, trading the Himalayan landscapes of Dharamsala for the city of Indore on the volcanic uplands of the Malwa Plateau. With those mountain peaks in the background, Dharamsala is only rivalled by Cape Town as the most visually dramatic Test ground in the world.

In Australia, conspiracy theories about the move are already circulating. The same teams played at Dharamsala in 2017 on a pitch with more for pace bowlers than the usual Indian track, so the story goes that India have shifted to another