Over to the spinners

If it's in Sydney, it's a great time to be a spinner. Ask Stuart MacGill, the man with 31 wickets in four matches here. Only once in eight innings has he gone wicketless. Then there's Shane Warne, who picked up 49 wickets in 10 games at just over 26.

Sydney has not been too generous to the pacers, as Jason Gillespie's average of 53 and Brett Lee's 32.5 will testify. Lee has taken 15 wickets in four Tests, while Gillespie has six in three. Luckily for India, Glenn McGrath isn't playing. The last time India toured, in 1999-2000, McGrath finished with figures of 10 for 103, and India lost by an innings and 141 runs - the heaviest defeat inflicted on a team in Sydney since 1931-32.

It was the third Indian defeat in seven Tests at the Sydney Cricket Ground, with three draws and one victory. The victory came way back in 1978, when Bishan Bedi, BS Chandrasekhar, and Erapalli Prasanna dismissed 17 batsmen to give India a spectacular victory by an innings and four runs.

Australia's win-loss record in Sydney is 46-27, and they have won nine of their last 11 Tests here. The only losses were inflicted by England and Pakistan, when Michael Vaughan and Mushtaq Ahmed batted and bowled their sides to victory.

The captain who calls correctly usually opts to bat, and that's been the case 13 times in the last 14 matches played here. It probably has something to do with the suspicions that a fourth and fifth-day Sydney pitch arouses.

The average first-innings total is 321, the third is 287, while the fourth dramatically dips to 196. But Australia has an average first-innings score of 402, while batting last, they score an average of only 194.

Australia didn't let the last Test against India at this venue go into the fourth day. India managed to bat a little more than 125 overs in the entire match, losing all their wickets, while Australia played over 140 and lost only five, with Justin Langer scoring 223 and Ricky Ponting, a blinding 141. But these were overshadowed by VVS Laxman's 167, a sign of things to come for Australia. The runs came in 198 balls, and to put the knock into context, the next-highest score by an Indian was 25, with extras coming in third, at 21.

With Zaheer Khan and Harbhajan Singh out, and the Indian seamers struggling, it's the right game to opt for a second spinner. Murali Kartik has played Australia before, bowling with control and variation. And he doesn't have to look too far back for inspiration from another left-arm spinner. In October, Ray Price picked up six wickets in an innings, including Ponting, Steve Waugh, and Damien Martyn, but a weak batting line-up failed him. Kartik doesn't have the same problem, as five of the top six Indians are in good form, with the sixth ticking like a bomb.