Mohali braced for meltdown with Australia in town for crunch World T20 clash

India has served up some real treats this tournament, but the host nation has one fBangalore swirls around you like a drain. Not as a slight on its ambience, but a sense of its surging movement. The grand round of the M. Chinnaswamy stadium could as easily be a plughole, and the whole surrounding mass of streets and trees and traffic is drawn into its orbit, folding back around this epicentre before rushing away down the curving culverts of side streets where buildings overhang in jumbled confusion. Everything is narrow, everything is crowded. Canals, in effect, and while the signature of the modern city is supposed to be gridlock, this place always seems to move.inal trick up its sleeve with Australia standing in the way of a semi-final berth.

The lanes are swarming with cops, dapper looking gents in slouch hats and uniforms the colour of sandstone. They’ve been carried down here in battered old police buses that now line the laneways, only towered over by the enormous generators that could be fuelling television trucks or light towers or even the buildings themselves. Who knows? Information here is as present and intangible as the fumes pouring from the generator exhausts, and extra layer of heat and substance folding into the thick humid air.

Inside the ground, Australia are playing India’s eastern neighbours. Bangladesh, Bangalore. I keep thinking that there must be a connection, a population of émigrés, but I’m told that diaspora is most numerous in Kerala. Still, there is a fair crowd of people in tonight, and the bulk of them seem to be vocal for the side in red and green.

The Chinnaswamy is beautiful on the outside, brutal on the inside. The grandstand is a gaping maw, the surging people inside it each no more than a tastebud. High steel fences skirt the perimeter. Cables run from them all the way to the overhanging roof, where bunched nets can be dropped to separate the crowd from the arena. I’m not sure if this is protect spectators from cricket practice, or a Blues Brothers device to protect the entertainers from their audience. Tonight the nets are bunched: the groundsmen have rolled them up, rawhide.

Bangladesh make heavy weather of batting first. Shane Watson, so maligned as a batsman, takes two wickets as an incisive opening bowler. Adam Zampa controls the middle overs in his fourth T20 international, taking 23-3 against batsman who should know better, but can’t bleed off their frustration at his unhittability. There are stutters aplenty, until Mahmudullah finishes things off with a fast 49, setting 157 to win.

Australia stutter reciprocally in the chase, losing a few wickets late to make it look closer than it was. Usman Khawaja at the top is unaffected, serene, 58 from 45 balls but not one of them struck in anger. He has batted for the last six months as though trying to remember a dream he had while on holiday in a meditation retreat. He is so far from the base physical world that he controls, gazing into the distance while he rocks onto the back foot or eases onto the front to rocket another ball towards whatever expanse of universe has caught his eye.

If Bangalore is a bathtub, Delhi is a sandwich press. It comes down flat and hot, pressing you to the pavement of this burning city. Everything is burning: the roads are heated underfoot, the smoke is constant, varying only in degree. There’s little dust. Most cities are about earth but this one is fire. We don’t need no water. Although we do, constantly, to keep the tissues of the body from shrivelling up.

Still, it’s somehow soothing. The streetlight at night creeps through haze, coming to you gently as though it doesn’t want to startle you. The streets are packed, markets and side stalls, impromptu dance-offs, random fires stacked in careful burns as though we were camping and it was under 25 degrees at midnight. There is chaos, but no one bothers me. Crossing the main train station is an endeavour of metal detectors and security checks, no-entry stairwells and stodgy escalators, crowds of people on the platforms waiting for late-night services to depart. The walkways cross and turn and link, hundreds of us passing through, collectively a whole little village in the sky above the station.

The Australian women’s team is playing Sri Lanka at the Feroz Shah Kotla. It is an even better name than some of the others. I keep hearing it as Ferocious Kotla. It is next to an ancient fort, from which it derives the name. Tall mud-brick walls, towers, a cloud of black birds circling in a fashion that can hardly be described as reassuring. More police buses, more searches, more frisking to the point of thoroughness that makes me wonder if I’m going to meet his parents.

The Sri Lankans are Ferocious Kotla. Historically their batting is frail. Today they lose a wicket from the second ball, an ugly hoick that lands at mid-on. The dodgiest of dodgy batting dismissals. But then, the next pair don’t mind at all.

Out comes Dilani Manodara, the wicketkeeper, and bats like a wicketkeeper. Full bore, full flourish. Sweeps, pulls, thwacks. Chamari Attapatu has a brief look and then joins in. They don’t mind pace, they don’t mind spin. They belt Farrell. They belt Perry. They belt Jonassen and Schutt. They make 38 each, and they’re separated with their team at 75 after 63 balls. From there Sri Lanka should get 150. Instead it’s 123, and Meg Lanning looks like she could chase it on her own. She gets there one wicket down.

Chandigarh is different. The city just next to the Mohali ground, I am told repeatedly by its residents, is the only planned city in India. It was laid down by India’s first prime minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru, as a sign of Indian independence and ingenuity. It has streets on a grid going north and south, east and west. It has suburbs named things like Sector 6, which are next to things like Sector 5 and Sector 7. It sounds a little bit like a dystopian future movie, but it works when you’re out amongst it.

Not everything is clockwork, though. Going to a cricket ground still means limboing your way under cordons of security, in configurations that change by the hour, and interpretations that change by the individual. You can’t enter here, you can park there, you can’t go through this area, or you can but not with that pass. OK, your pass is fine, go in over there and stop over here.

Pakistan fans find their way through the maze twice, once to play New Zealand and once to play Australia. They lose both. For the Australia match, especially, the atmosphere is cranked up near full. This has the best turnout of any match I’ve seen this tournament. Indians are down as well, mostly supporting Pakistan. This country’s contradictions would continue to surprise for years to come. They whole crowd is up for the challenge. There’s a proper buzz to the ground. Wahab Riaz comes on, fast and furious. Khawaja goes, then David Warner, both in a flurry of LED light. The buzz becomes a hornet plague.

But the Australians are up for this game too and they finally have a good batting pitch to work with. The grass is an illusion, the pitch is hard underneath. The ball comes on to the bat, the ball comes off. Steve Smith and Watson nail it, with Glenn Maxwell making a cameo in between. Smith is all ingenuity and bullshit-artistry, pacing around the crease like he’s waiting for a blood test result.

He doesn’t look remotely fussed by the bowling, he’s all about what he can do with it. He moves it around as he pleases. He is the arbiter of when and where. The tennis whip, the cackhanded inside-out cover drive, and the signature stroke of the innings, standing two feet outside off stump, hypnotising Wahab into bowling even wider, then actually walking off the mowed pitch to reach a ball that was still to his off-side, and whipping it through forward square leg for four.

Watson, meanwhile, needs no such fuss. When he wants to go, he takes one step towards leg and goes, his giant arms swinging like smokehouse hams in an earthquake. Mohammad Amir might be the stud bowler with the great start to the innings, but

when he tries to nail Watson’s pads he gets casually driven over long-on for six. Shorter, gets pulled over midwicket for the same. Between times, another six driven over cover with the sweetest bat-swing. Fours are flayed away from anything outside off stump. Wahab cops it. Mohammad Sami cops it. Australia sets 193, and Zampa supplies the half-nelson once again.

If that game was good, Mohali has one more trick up its sleeve. It has been sitting quietly over the weekend, waiting for the moment. But the moment will come soon enough. The Indian team has already arrived in town. On Sunday night they take on Australia. The winner plays semi-finals. The loser doesn’t. That’s all there is to it. If the pitch remains good, it could be a batting shoot-out between two sides that can be godly on the right surface. If it turns, India will have the advantage, but Zampa has answered every big ask made of him so far. Whatever it does, the ground will be full and the roads will be too. If India win, even the planning of Jawahar Nehru will not be enough to keep this town in order.