Australia have retained the same team which registered a rousing win at Indore last week but India have made changes in a bid to regain the momentum for the final Border-Gavaskar Test at Ahmedabad.
Steve Smith, who will again lead Australia after Pat Cummins told the team at the start of the week that he would be remaining home with his gravely ill mother, won the toss and elected to bat.
Mitchell Starc will be the sole fast bowler with all-rounder Cameron Green also on hand to bowl seamers with Nathan Lyon, Todd Murphy and Matt Kuhnemann to form a spin trio for the third straight Test.
The Indians have brought veteran seamer Mohammed Shami back into their attack at the expense of Mohammed Siraj
The pitch – the one the curators have chosen after preparing two strips – looks much flatter than the motley surfaces which were dished up for the first three matches.
“It looks like a nice surface,” Smith said. “It does look like a good wicket. This wicket will take spin as the game goes on.”
The MCG’s world record for largest crowd to attend a day of Test cricket is likely to be shattered when an estimated 110,000 people pack into watch India and Australia.
The colossal stadium bearing the name of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will stage a spectacle like nothing witnessed before in cricket history for the opening of the fourth Test on Thursday.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joined Modi to celebrate “75 years of friendship through cricket” for a range of events before the match.
Fans were told to be seated inside the 132,000-capacity Narendra Modi Stadium well before the leaders of the two countries arrived about an hour prior to play.
Travis Head and Steve Smith inspect the pitch in Ahmedabad. (Photo by Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)
Albanese and Modi were taken through the India-Australia Platinum Hall of Fame within the stadium before the prime ministers met the players after a lap of honour around the ground.
Albanese is expected to stay at the Ahmedabad colosseum for about an hour before moving on to other commitments in Mumbai and Delhi. But, remarkably, according to reports, Modi will stay on to do some TV commentary on the match.
A number of influential Australian business leaders, including Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce, Fortescue Metals boss Andrew Forrest and Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn, have joined Albanese on his first trip to India as prime minister.
The final crowd figure will be a source of fascination with up to 85,000 of the day-one tickets in the 132,000-capacity stadium set aside for local families and students.
Initial fears that travelling Australian spectators could be locked out of having access to watch the start of the match were eased this week after they’d previously only been able to purchase tickets for days two to five.
The record attendance for a single day of Test cricket stands at 91,112 from the start of the 2013-14 Ashes battle at the MCG.
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Australia offspinner Todd Murphy, who grew up in the border towns of Echuca and Moama, was looking forward to the challenge of playing in front of such a big crowd.
“It’s going to be noisy, it’s exciting though,” Murphy said. “I think everyone sort of looks forward to opportunities to play in front of those sort of crowds, it will be a great atmosphere.”
After a near five-year rebuild, the stadium in the capital of the Indian state of Gujarat, reopened in February 2020.
The first event in the stadium was a political event when Donald Trump arrived in India, with the former US president infamously mispronouncing the names of cricket icons Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli during a speech.
The ground, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium, was renamed after Modi ahead of the 2021 Test between India and England.
The attendance record for the stadium is 101,566 when Gujarat Titans defeated the Rajasthan Royals in last year’s Indian Premier League final.
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