Thirimanne the bunny, and Ashwin-Jadeja v Kumble-Harbhajan

When R Ashwin dismissed Lahiru Thirimanne in the morning session, not many would have been surprised. After all, this had already happened 11 times previously in all international cricket - six times in ODIs, five times in Tests, and once in T20Is. It is the most times he has dismissed any batsman, and the most times any bowler has dismissed Thirimanne in international cricket.

Since the start of 2010, only two bowler-batsman pairs are higher in this list: Mahela Jayawardene-Saeed Ajmal, and Mohammad Hafeez-Dale Steyn. Both Thirimanne and Ashwin feature once more in the top five - Thirimanne has been Anderson's bunny as well, while Ashwin has had plenty of success against David Warner as well.

In terms of frequency of dismissal, though, the Ashwin-Thirimanne one is better than any of the other entries in the top five. Of the 18 times that Ashwin has bowled to Thirimanne in internationals, he has dismissed him 12 times, which is a frequency of one dismissal every 1.5 innings.

For the 24th time in a home Test, Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja were a part of India's team, and as usual, they wreaked havoc on the opposition batsmen, combining to take 7 for 123 to bundle Sri Lanka out for 205. In these 24 Tests, they have combined to take 273 wickets at 20.94, with 22 five-wicket hauls between them. In these 24 matches, these two bowlers have taken 64% of India's bowler-wickets; the other bowlers have combined to take 155 scalps at 33.35.

Australia's top order versus England's lower order

Australia have home advantage going into the 2017-18 Ashes series, but several pundits have suggested that the series is too close to call, with neither team having an overwhelming advantage. And while it is true that England were drubbed 5-0 the last time they toured here, in 2013-14, in terms of recent form there is little to separate the two.

Australia's worry over the last 18 months has been their batting, while England seem to have a few holes in their top order as well. In terms of recent results, England have a slight edge: since April 2016, they have a 10-9 win-loss record compared to Australia's 6-8. However, that is also because England have played two home seasons during this period to Australia's one: they have been 9-4 at home and 1-5 away, while Australia were 4-2 at home and 2-6 away.

The comparison is made easier by the fact that both teams have played similar opposition sides recently. In these last 18 months, both Australia and England have played at home against South Africa and Pakistan, and away in India and Bangladesh. Australia had a 6-5 record in these matches, compared to England's 6-8: they lost 0-4 to India and only managed a 2-2 draw against Pakistan, while Australia did better against these teams but lost at home to South Africa. In these four series, there is little to choose between the batting averages of the two teams, but Australia were the better bowling unit, averaging 29.14 to England's 33.23. (Apart from these four series, Australia toured Sri Lanka and lost 3-0 during this period, while England played home series versus Sri Lanka and West Indies, winning 2-0 and 2-1. These series skew the overall numbers in England's favour during this period.)

While the overall batting averages are almost the same in these series, the break-up by batting positions reveals the different strengths of these two teams. Australia's top five, which includes David Warner, Steven Smith, Usman Khawaja and Peter Handscomb, have pretty good numbers in these four series, with the top four slots all averaging in the mid- to late-40s. Smith has averaged 63.55 in these games, while Warner (45.04), Handsomb (49.07) and Khawaja (48.58) have also been impressive.

England's top five, on the other hand, struggled in these four series, with only Joe Root averaging more than 40. He averaged an outstanding 53.86, but next best was Alastair Cook at 39.62, followed by Moeen Ali (36.38) and Jonny Bairstow (34.10). Together, they managed only eight hundreds in 15 Tests, compared to Australia's 13 from 12. Among the failures for England in the top five positions in these series are Gary Ballance (304 runs in 15 innings), Keaton Jennings (294 from 12) and James Vince, who is slotted to bat at No. 3 in the Ashes. Vince has scored only 212 runs from 11 innings in his Test career, while batting at numbers four or five in those innings.

Vinay Kumar keeps his India comeback dream alive

R Vinay Kumar hasn't yet given up on his dream of playing for India again, four years after his last international appearance. The ghosts of that match still linger when his international career is discussed: on a flat pitch at his home ground, the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru against Australia, Vinay was battered for 102 runs, the second-most expensive nine-over returns in ODIs.

Opportunities since have been scant. He was part of the squad for home series against West Indies later that year, and travelled to Bangladesh in 2014, but did not make the XI. Vinay is at peace with his position, realising the competition among pacers in the national side, but is firm in the pursuit of his ambition. At 33, he is working harder than ever on keeping himself fit and has learned to be smarter about his bowling workload. "I'm matured enough to understand my situation. If I'm 21 or 22, then it (being out of the India team) may be very difficult to digest," he told ESPNcricinfo.

Vinay has learned to count every chance he gets as a blessing. He has had the right kind of people around to guide him, like Sachin Tendulkar, his mentor at Mumbai Indians, who impressed on him the importance of remembering the love for the game that he started out with in the first place.

"Bowlers are always happy to take five wickets. I'm the kind of bowler, who when a partnership needs to be broken, I'll be happy to come in and get a wicket. That's like getting five wickets for me. These small moments are what I enjoy very much. Breaking partnerships is a huge achievement for me. Indian team is always at the back of my mind, but I try to seek happiness from such small things and it makes me work harder on my game."

The time out of the Indian team has not affected his domestic impact. In the last four seasons, Vinay has been among Karnataka's top two wicket-takers in three of them. He captained them to six domestic titles in the 2013-14 and 2014-15 seasons. This year, he has already taken 13 wickets in three matches at 15.46, including a six-for against Maharashtra. With over 400 first-class wickets at an average of 23, Vinay has been a powerhouse performer in first-class cricket. His 369 wickets in the Ranji Trophy make him the highest wicket-taker among pace bowlers in the history of the tournament.

"Last three years, I got two awards from BCCI: best bowler award (highest wicket-taker in 2014-15 Ranji Trophy) and best allrounder award (in limited-overs cricket in 2013-14). Performance-wise, I don't have any doubt that I can come back into the Indian side, but I need to wait for an opportunity.

"There are two ways of looking at it - one, get frustrated and try to do something that you're not used to, or second is to keep it simple and keep doing what you have been, try to enjoy your cricket and whenever you get the opportunity, try to perform and raise your goals a little higher. You may or may not reach the goal, but that kind of challenges and motivates you to go out and perform. At the end of the day, when I go back to my room, I should be happy about the way I bowled. That feel-good factor is very important for me."

The Hasan Ali factor in Pakistan's bowling attack

Pakistan have always prided themselves on the quality of their pace attack, but recently that reputation has been under some threat, in ODIs at least. In the three years, between January 2014 and December 2016, Pakistan's fast bowlers collectively averaged 39.57 in ODIs. Among the 19 teams that played ODIs during that period, only four had poorer averages: Zimbabwe (41.29), UAE (42.14), Kenya (44.12), and Canada (45.12).

Then, along came Hasan Ali. Though he had made his ODI debut in 2016, he didn't do too much of note in the eight games he played that year, taking 11 wickets at 31.18, and an economy rate of 5.3 runs per over. They are pretty respectable numbers, but not a patch on what he has achieved this year.

In 2017, Hasan has been the stand-out bowler in ODIs: from just 18 games, he has picked up 45 wickets - easily the highest for the year - at an exceptional average of 17, and a strike rate of 20.3. Along the way, he has also become the joint fourth-fastest, in terms of matches played, to reach 50 ODI wickets, getting there in just 24 games. Only Ajantha Mendis, Ajit Agarkar and Mitchell McClenaghan have reached the landmark in fewer matches. Among Pakistan bowlers, Hasan got there faster than Waqar Younis (27 matches), Saqlain Mushtaq (29) and Shoaib Akhtar (29).

Those numbers have transformed the stats for Pakistan's quick bowlers in 2017. From languishing at the bottom of the table between 2014 and 2016, they have moved to the top in 2017: their average of 25.61 is the best among fast bowlers from the top nine teams this year, while their strike rate of 28.6 balls per wicket is their best in any calendar year.

The return of the low-scoring ODI to India

During the home seasons over the past few years, Indian fans have celebrated dominant series wins, Rohit Sharma's double-centuries, the rise of India's new-look pace attack and the birth of a promising allrounder in Hardik Pandya, among other things. Even though India's fortunes have hardly changed in ODIs, barring the loss to South Africa in 2015, one factor that has largely gone unnoticed is the change in the nature of the pitches.

While players mostly use words such as "slow wicket" and "two-paced" to describe the tracks in interviews or press conferences, scorecards and performances show there has been a definite change in the nature of pitches that curators have prepared over the last couple of seasons.

In 2013 and 2014, Indian fans would scream their lungs out as teams scored 300 with ease and India often chased that down without much trouble. When India hosted Australia in late 2013 for seven ODIs, the lowest first-innings total in the series was 295 even as scores of 359, 303 and 350 were chased successfully, which clearly showed teams - especially hosts India - preferred to bat second on such flat pitches. Just consider the run rate the Indian pitches produced in the two years leading up to the 2015 World Cup: 6.05. From February 2013 to February 2015, India topped the list when it came to average run rates for ODIs at home, the only country to have the figure above six per over.

However, since the 2015 World Cup, India have dropped to fourth - excluding Pakistan as a venue, as the country has hosted only three ODIs in that time - with an average run rate of 5.73 behind Australia (6), England (5.98) and South Africa (5.95). While it not only means lower scores have been posted in the last two and a half years in India, it has also shown that totals around 250 have been defendable, like against New Zealand last year and versus Australia recently. The reasons for that are not restricted to pitches though.

Earlier, teams winning the toss would often opt to bowl to avoid bowling with the dew later on. That factor has changed, however, as the start times of ODIs have been brought forward from 2.30pm to 1.30pm local time since November 2014, when India hosted Sri Lanka for five ODIs.

Also, unlike England, South Africa and Australia, India has a varied array of conditions because of wide-ranging venues across the country and the dynamic factors of soil and regional weather conditions. Even as the other three countries play on more standardised and flatter pitches which last the full 100 overs more frequently, the average scoring-rate per match has reduced in India because of the lack of uniformity in conditions even within an ODI series.

The dew, for example, does not show up in all cities across the year, which means bowling second is not as big a risk. While the Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi has remained slow and low, a relaid pitch at Eden Gardens is prominently greener now and the ones in Mumbai and Bengaluru almost always promise a big score.

As a result, teams have started batting first on winning the toss - like during the recent Australia series - as chasing 320 is not the norm anymore and pitches are now being prepared to assist slower bowlers more.

These changing results may not be just an act of chance or fate, though. India suffered losses in the knockouts of the last three world events - the 2015 World Cup semi-final, the 2016 World T20 semi-final, and the 2017 Champions Trophy final - on flatter pitches, so they probably wanted to change things at home at least; flat tracks meant India could post big scores, if batting first, but could not always defend them because of a weak bowling attack and its inability to curtail other batting line-ups. It may not be an accident that India have moved away from batsmen-friendly pitches in recent times.

"The last few series we played [at home], it was challenging wickets, slow wickets that were turning and some of the wickets we played were little damp, where it was stopping and coming - two-paced wickets," Rohit Sharma said on Friday. "If the wicket has something in it for the bowlers, there comes the challenge for the batsmen."

A statement like this would have been unimaginable from a batsman who scored two double-centuries within a span of a year from 2013 to 2014, when thick bats and shorter boundaries were ruling the roost. But the change in trend has meant his new team-mates - Kuldeep Yadav, Axar Patel and Yuzvendra Chahal - get more purchase from the pitches as India have started to defend totals under 300 more consistently.

The result is a much more even contest between bat and ball as was seen during the ODIs against New Zealand a year ago when the visitors successfully defended totals of 242 and 260 in Delhi and Ranchi respectively. For a change, it gave a bilateral series a scoreline of 2-2, adding interest not only within the matches but to the fifth ODI as well. Such variety of pitches and results has produced some of the more entertaining and balanced ODIs in recent times, and with the proposed ODI league still three years away, this may not be a bad trend for the format at all.

The curious cases of Shafiq and Karunaratne

Since the start of 2010, 26 batsmen have scored 3000 or more Test runs. Twenty-three of them average 40 or more. Among the three who don't are two batsmen who distinguished themselves in the recently concluded Pakistan-Sri Lanka Tests. Dimuth Karunaratne made 306 runs in the series, including a marathon 196 in Dubai and was Sri Lanka's top run scorer, while Asad Shafiq topped the run charts for Pakistan with 183, including a magnificent fourth-innings 112 in Dubai.

However, neither batsman has consistently churned out runs consistently at the Test level, which is why they languish at the bottom of that list. Karunaratne averaged a meagre 33.34 in 20 Tests in 2015 and '16, before turning the corner this year, scoring 940 runs at an average of 47 in 2017.

Shafiq had a stellar 2015, scoring 706 runs in 13 innings at 54.3, but he has struggled for any sort of consistency over the last 14 months: in 15 Tests between July 2016 and September 2017 (excluding the Dubai game), he managed just 834 runs at 30.88. Though he did get that magnificent 137 in the fourth innings of the Gabba Test during this period, he was also frustratingly inconsistent, getting dismissed below 20 sixteen times in 28 innings; he made almost as many ducks (six) as he did 50-plus scores (seven) in this period. Even with his 112 in the Dubai Test, Shafiq's average in 2017 is only 25.81 from 11 innings, numbers that do scant justice to his talent.

There is another similarity between the career numbers of Shafiq and Karunaratne: their distribution of runs and averages across the four innings of a Test. Both have good numbers in the first innings and a dip in the second - which is far more prominent for Karunaratne - but the surprising stat is the fourth-innings average: both average more in the fourth innings than they do in any of the other three. That is a pretty rare phenomenon, given that run-scoring is usually toughest in the last innings. In fact, among the 27 players who have batted at least 15 times in the last innings of Tests since the start of 2010, both Karunaratne and Shafiq are in the top eight in terms of average. Neither has an average that is propped up too much by not-outs - Karunaratne has three in 15, and Shafiq three in 17 - which is why, in terms of runs per innings, they move up to the top five among these 27 batsmen. That is quite a contrast to their overall averages during this period, where they languish among the bottom three out of 26 batsmen. (Misbah-ul-Haq leads in terms of fourth-innings average, with 67.8, but he has remained not-out in 11 of 21 innings; in terms of runs per innings, he is in 12th place with an RPI of 32.29.)

Zampa wins the latest battle against Pandya

"I knew that I could hit a six off him anytime I wanted to."

Even for a man in red-hot form, that's a bold statement to make. But Hardik Pandya said it with his chin in his hands, a shrug of his shoulders and a tilt of the head. Much like one would say, "One plus one? Yeah, that's two."

It was a good thing that Adam Zampa wasn't at the press conference. He was overlooked by Australia after being biffed for three successive sixes, relegated to the bench at a time when wristspinners are very noticeably taking over one-day cricket. He didn't need to hear the man responsible for his fortunes plummeting sit in front of a room full of headline-hungry journalists and parade his dominance.

Zampa did, however, need to figure out how to counter Pandya if they were to meet again. So he trained, hitting the nets at every opportunity. He was one of the last players to finish practice when Australia were in Indore, working with spin consultant S Sriram.

Regardless of the amount of preparation, though, a spinner bowling to Pandya will know that he cannot err in the slightest. The India allrounder can, and has, hit sixes as soon as he arrives at the crease. That's what happened on Thursday when he launched the second ball he faced out of the ground. He also doesn't really need the room that most other batsmen like in order to free their arms. His bottom-handed power can compensate for that. Just the other day, Pandya was helicoptering sixes at the Holkar Stadium, as if he were showing off for MS Dhoni who was practicing alongside him.

Zampa would have known he had to face his rival again when Ashton Agar injured his hand in the third ODI. Australia had no other frontline spinner and with the series lost already, there was very little reason to fly a replacement in.

The battle began innocuously enough - two runs off five balls. But in the 28th over, Pandya crashed a six over midwicket and the follow-up delivery - aimed at the wide line outside off - sailed over deep cover. Hiding the ball away from the batsman's reach is how India have kept Glenn Maxwell quiet. But Pandya, by hitting through the line, as opposed to slogging across it or unnecessarily jumping down, posed a greater challenge.

Zampa was taken off. The seamers came back and Australia regained some control. But they couldn't break the partnership. Pandya and Kedar Jadhav had brought the equation down to 117 off 15 overs. Steven Smith turned to his under-fire legspinner again.

Zampa took the ball, knowing he was about to make or break the match. His first over back was, if nothing, well thought out and better executed. He mixed the tossed up deliveries with the quicker ones, trying his best to avoid being lined up at a ground with short boundaries. In Chennai, he had not really tried playing with his length like this, going full and often putting it right in the slot.

The 36th over cost only two runs. Zampa earned another shot at Pandya - this time with some pressure to work with - which might well have been Australia's plan all along. They gambled with some of Pat Cummins and Nathan Coulter-Nile's overs, which helped keep the scoring in check and made the Indians feel like they had to find another source for quick runs.

Zampa began the 38th over with a fast and flat delivery angled into middle and leg stump. But he made sure to give it a good rip. He wanted Pandya to go for the slog, and if that happened, he gave himself the best chance of a wicket by making sure the ball would turn.

The plan worked and David Warner, taking the catch at long-off, celebrated with as much gusto as he did earlier in the day when he got to a hundred in his 100th ODI.

"Zamps is a really good wicket-taker and quite an aggressive bowler," acting coach David Saker said. "He came in today and bowled some really good balls and good stuff for us. Against Pandya, who is a dangerous hitter, if you get it a little bit wrong, he hits you out of the park. It's a learning curve for him, and for all of us bowling to him."

Australia passed the test at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, removing India's power-hitter before the last 10 overs could even begin, and that played no small part in breaking a year-long ODI losing streak away from home.