“If he has to do damage, if he has to throw the first punch, that’s the best place from where he can do it. And it is important that India get their judgment right here, because 1-1 in the series, this is the moving Test match.

“I feel whichever team wins this Test match will win the series. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind. So it is very, very important that India get the balance right, because Australia have got the confidence back.”

Rohit’s last 12 Test innings have returned scores of 6, 5, 23, 8, 2, 52, 0, 8, 18, 11, 3 and 6, meaning he has little to lose by trying to go on the attack. That aggressive, proactive Rohit has been a source of some threat to Australia in recent times, not least when he destroyed Mitchell Starc in the Twenty20 World Cup earlier this year.

Shastri, who spoke evocatively of his long history in Australia at the first annual Usman Khawaja Foundation lunch at the Gabba on Thursday, said that the unity of the team four years ago, despite stringent COVID-19 biosecurity, was critical to victory.

“Being locked up and then having to give their best in the middle, and in a country like India where there’s 1.4 billion people, there’s no sympathy,” he said. “‘To hell with COVID, what’s COVID, jolly well win the Test match’. That’s all they want. So there’s no hiding in our part of the world.

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“In COVID, the first Test match you start with five bowlers and the same five bowlers don’t play the last Test. That says it all, it’s like Australia playing without these five bowlers in the last Test of the series, it’s a different ball game. Plus you didn’t have quite a few batsmen as well. So it’s a tribute to the players.

“You can only do so much as a coach from behind the scenes. At the end of it, it’s the players who have to go out there and do their job and they were magnificent.”

He recalled how a dismissed batter, Shubman Gill, had stepped up to advise Rishabh Pant of how to navigate the last portion of the memorable fourth innings chase that delivered victory for the tourists here in January 2021.

“I’ll never forget it,” Shastri said. “Last session, 140 runs to get. We had two different change rooms because of COVID. I went down from the coaches’ room to have a chat with either Rishabh or [Chateshwar] Pujara. When I was about to reach the toilet I heard a conversation between Gill and Pant.

“Seventy-one overs bowled, Gill had got out for 91, and they were the two youngest players in the side, 21 and 22. ‘Nine overs left, they need the new ball, they’ll bring [Marnus] Labuschagne on with his leg spin, you’ve got to score 45-50 runs there’.

“They are planning how they can reach closer to the end score, and no way was I going to stop them, I don’t want to change that mindset. So I just walked past and said ‘do what you have to do’. In the end we chased down nearly 150 in that last session.”

For India to reverse a lopsided result in Adelaide, Rohit will need to harness a similarly self-reliant spirit among his team.

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