At the start of the summer, we asked our readers to vote for their favourite moments in the decades-long cricket rivalry between Australia and India.

Last week’s MCG win came too late to make the cut, but here are the top vote getters, starting with number 10.

10. Michael Clarke’s triple century

It’s hard to think of a player standing taller while carrying a bigger weight than Michael Clarke in 2012.

And it all started with a majestic triple century against India at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Australia was still rebuilding after its golden era and Clarke had taken over as captain a year earlier, for the final Test of an unconscionable 3-1 Ashes loss at home.

From the start of 2009 to the end of 2011, no less than 23 players made their debuts in the men’s Test team, and Clarke himself had battled through significant form slumps in that time.

Three-and-a-half months before start of the 2012 SCG Test, Clarke snapped a century drought that lasted 23 innings over more than 17 months. He followed it up with tons in Cape Town and Brisbane, but it was just an entree to what was to come.

Having won the first Test and bowled India out for just 191 after tea on day one in Sydney, Clarke still found himself at the crease before the drinks break as David Warner, Ed Cowan and Shaun Marsh fell quickly to make it 3-37.

But any Indian hopes of running through the Aussies were dashed as Clarke and Ricky Ponting dug in.

Shortly after lunch on day two both had tons and Clarke already had 150 when Ponting fell for 134. By stumps, he’d found another willing partner, powering on to 250 alongside Michael Hussey.

By the time Clarke declared at 4-659 on the third afternoon, Hussey had 150 and the skipper was 329 not out, admirably opting not to keep batting to reach the fabled Bradman-Taylor 334 mark.

Clarke would go on to score 1,595 runs in 11 Tests in 2012, averaging 106.33 for the year and scoring three doubles and century to go with his SCG masterclass.

9. The Chennai tie

If I had a nickel for every time Australia has been involved in a tied Test match, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice, right?

After being on one side of the first tie in Test history — against the West Indies at the Gabba in 1960 — Australia played in the second and still most recent, against India in 1986.

The match was famous for Dean Jones’s viscerally uncomfortable double ton (more on that later), India captain Kapil Dev’s majestic 119 in the first innings, Ravi Shastri’s slashing 48 off 40 in the second, and a 10-wicket haul for Aussie spinner Greg Matthews, including the final scalp of Maninder Singh.

The last wicket fell with India on 347, one run shy of the victory target, creating one of the rarest feats in Test cricket.

8. Australia are Test champs

In a bid to bring more stakes to Test matches as the oldest form of the game tries to stay relevant in the face of the faster, brighter, more sugary Twenty20 fare, the International Cricket Council reintroduced the World Test Championship at the end of the last decade.

New Zealand beat India in the first final in 2021 after a two-year period that included the depths of COVID-19. Come 2023 at The Oval in London, and India was back, this time alongside Australia.

Australia was coming off a 2-1 series loss in India, and was ramping up into the only series bigger on its calendar, the Ashes in England. But first came the small matter of vying for the crown of world Test champions in a one-off, winner-take-mace five-day match.

India won the toss and Rohit Sharma, perhaps buoyed by having watched the Australian top order struggle so much in India three months earlier, sent the Aussies in to bat.

This time India reduced Australia to an uninspiring 3-76, but Travis Head (163) and Steve Smith (121) took over from there, guiding Australia to a whopping 469.

Australia dictated terms for the rest of the match, getting contributions from just about everyone before Nathan Lyon bowled the team to victory on day five, meaning the Aussie men briefly held the titles of Test, ODI and T20 world champions at the same time.

7. Teen Tendulkar marks his arrival in Australia

When an 18-year-old Sachin Tendulkar arrived in Australia in 1991, he already had India enraptured and his first Test century on the board — a match-saving 119 not out against England in Manchester.

After two Tests without making much of an impact with the bat, Tendulkar punished an Australian attack for the first, but certainly not the last, time at the SCG.

Coming in at 4-201 thanks to opener Ravi Shastri (who went on to score 206 off 477 balls), Tendulkar doubled down on the Indian demolition job as he amassed an unbeaten 148 runs in his first of two centuries in the series.

Remarkably, the drawn Sydney Test was also notable for the debut of legendary Aussie leg-spinner Shane Warne, who returned figures of 1-150 from 45 brutal overs.

6. Clarke’s last-over heroics

Michael Clarke scored a century on debut in Bengaluru in 2004, and counted an unbeaten 329 and 210 among his seven centuries against India. But perhaps his most famous moment came in Test where he scored a combined one run across two innings with the bat.

Australia led by 332 when Ricky Ponting declared early on the fifth morning of the second game of the 2007/08 series at the Sydney Cricket Ground. But by tea, only three Indian wickets had fallen.

Three wickets later — including a controversial Clarke catch to dismiss top-scorer Sourav Ganguly for 51 — veterans MS Dhoni and Anil Kumble came together and knuckled under for 21 overs until man of the match Andrew Symonds trapped Dhoni LBW for 35 off 82.

Captain Kumble persisted, farming the strike away from India’s long tail.

When a desperate Ponting turned to his bright young star with India seven wickets down, the shadows lengthening and just over 20 minutes left in the Test, Clarke admitted he felt there was “not a chance in hell” of Australia winning the game.

His first over of left-arm spin passed without consequence with 20 minutes left in the day, but his next sparked pandemonium.

The first ball bounced sharply and caught the shoulder of Harbhajan Singh’s bat, with Michael Hussey taking the catch. One hearty celebration, the next ball skipped straight on and trapped a hapless RP Singh plumb LBW, leaving just one wicket to get — that of 19-year-old Ishant Sharma.

Ishant, either foolishly or craftily took two right-hand gloves out to the middle, but when he eventually got out to the middle only made it through two deliveries safely before nicking off, with the Aussies celebrating a 16th straight Test victory against India once more.

5. A rare victory in India

Heat and humidity may be familiar to Australians and Indians alike, but that’s where the similarities end in terms of conditions for cricket.

The dusty, slow, turning wickets of India are as far geographically as they are in style from the bouncy greentops of Australia, and that chasm was even more stark in years gone by.

Perhaps that’s why Australia went 35 years without winning over there after 1969. But that changed in 2004 when Adam Gilchrist stepped in as captain and led Australia to a famous 2-1 series victory.

Without Ricky Ponting for the first three Tests, Gilchrist, rookie Michael Clarke, Damien Martyn and one of final great rides of the Warne-McGrath-Gillespie triumvirate saw Australia to two wins and a draw in the first three Tests to lock up an historic win before the series was through.

4. Rishabh Pant’s Gabba heroics

From winning the unwinnable on the road to losing the unlosable at home.

Things started pretty much on trend for India in its tour of Australia in 2020 — with a resounding loss in the day-night Adelaide Test.

It looked like it would get worse in a hurry as India lost star batter and captain Virat Kohli and veteran seamer Mohammed Shami for the rest of the series, but stand-in skipper Ajinkya Rahane led his team to a dominant win at the MCG as Australia’s batters failed to score more than 200 in four straight innings.

A draw at the SCG, in which Australia took just five wickets in 131 overs across days four and five exposed some issues on the bowling front and showed off India’s grit with the bat.

But even so, by the time the finale at the Gabba began, India was handing caps to net bowlers Washington Sundar and T Natarajan (the fifth and sixth Indian debutants in four games) after also losing Umesh Yadav and Ravichandran Ashwin to injury.

Australia was surely locked in for victory when they sent India in late on day four with an unprecedented victory target of 329. But by lunch on the final day, only one wicket had fallen and third-gamer Shubman Gill and Cheteshwar Pujara were nailed to the crease.

By tea, only two more wickets had been taken. India was in the driver’s seat and could have tried to hold on for a draw to retain the Border-Gavaskar trophy, but instead set about chasing down the extra 146 runs needed for victory in the last session, powered by Rishabh Pant’s slogging efforts.

Pujara, Mayank Agarawal, Washington Sundar and Shardul Thakur lost their wickets while Rishabh tonked the vaunted Aussie attack to all parts of the Brisbane ground.

The last five overs went for 51 runs in fading light as Rishabh’s unbeaten 89 led India to its first Test win at the Gabba, marked the first time Australia had been defeated at the ground since 1988 and handed the hosts a second straight series loss on home soil against India.

3. Travis Head wins the World Cup for Australia

2023 was a peculiar year for Travis Head.

After wrapping up a home summer in which he scored 525 runs at an average of 87.5, he was sensationally dropped for the first Test in India, then recalled for the second.

Over the next eight Tests across India and England, he cemented his place in the Australian Test side — thanks in large part to a match-winning 163 in the World Test Championship final — before returning to his roots as a limited-overs gun for the 50-over World Cup in India.

Head missed the first five games with a broken hand but the opener came back with a bang as he scored 109 against New Zealand and top-scored for the Aussies with 62, as well as two wickets in the semifinal win over South Africa.

After bowling the hosts out for a manageable 240, Australia stumbled to 3-47 after seven overs, but Head remained.

Marnus Labuschagne played a crucial hand with an unbeaten 58 off 110, but Head was flying at the other end, plundering the attack to all parts en route to 137 off 120, silencing the raucous fans with every one of his 15 fours and four sixes.

He finally fell one run shy of India’s score, but the job was done and Australia’s sixth men’s Cricket World Cup trophy was in the cabinet thanks to Head.

2. Laxman and Dravid don’t follow the script

Australia’s cruisy 10-wicket win in the opening Test of the 2001 tour of India marked the 16th straight win for Steve Waugh’s side dating back to late 1999.

When Ricky Ponting (110) and Matthew Hayden (97) led Australia to 445 in the first innings and Glenn McGrath (4-18) consigned India to 171 all out in Kolkata, a 17th straight win and first series victory in India since 1969 looked all but assured.

But, after enforcing the follow-on with a 274-run lead and taking 4-232, Australia was suddenly staring down an immovable wall. Two, in fact.

VVS Laxman came to the crease for the second time before tea on day three. Rahul Dravid joined him later in the afternoon.

Ten of Australia’s XI had a turn bowling at them, but both were still batting when India passed 600 on the fifth morning.

Laxman ultimately scored 281 and Dravid 180 as India built a 383-run lead before declaring and giving themselves just over two sessions to take all 10 Aussie wickets.

Hopes of victory gone, Australia just needed to hang on for the draw and looked well placed to do so at 3-161 with Matthew Hayden and Steve Waugh at the crease at tea, but it all went to hell after that.

Waugh and Ricky Ponting fell in the third over of the final session, Adam Gilchrist was gone three balls later, and top-scorer Hayden was the last recognised batter to fall two overs after that. India took the last three wickets as Harbhajan Singh and Sachin Tendulkar spun Australia out for just 212, levelling the series that they went on to win by two wickets in Chennai.

1. Dean Jones plunders and chunders in Chennai

The details of Dean Jones’s famed double century in Chennai are pretty gruesome, so let’s just say that he was so dehydrated that he lost control of certain bodily functions.

“He would hit me for a boundary, go to mid-wicket, vomit, come back, do that again. It was amazing,” India spinner Maninder Singh said of Jones, who lost 7 kilograms during the Test.

Remarkably, it was just his third Test and first in more than two years, marking himself as more than just a stylish stroke-maker but one of the grittiest players in the world.

And, as it turns out, your favourite memory in decades’ worth of cricket between Australia and India across all formats.