Tim Paine knows too well how cruel and volatile cricket in India can be.

As a 25-year-old in his first Test there in 2010, Paine ground out (what proved a career-high) 92 to help Australia to a first-innings lead. Success seemed certain when India lost their penultimate fourth-innings wicket nearly 100 shy of their target of 216. But the wicketkeeper could only watch on from behind the stumps as bogeyman VVS Laxman put on 92 with the hosts’ final two batters to steal an epic one-wicket comeback victory.

Since their 2004 series triumph in India, Australia have won just two Tests in the country. That heartbreak in Mohali was as close as they have gotten to a third in 18 attempts since.

Fifteen years on, Paine was similarly powerless last month as he watched as the greenhorn Australia A side he has spent the year mentoring squander a 226-run first-innings advantage to lose to an India A team in at a brutally hot-and-humid stadium in Lucknow.

Paine only got one chance at playing a Test series in India. As a coach, he hopes his charges get an opportunity to atone for their missteps.

“We ran out of petrol, we lost a bit of concentration and missed some chances,” Paine told cricket.com.au of the KL Rahul-inspired India A win at the Ekana Stadium.

“But what a great learning experience not only to go through that as a group, but to watch KL Rahul get a huge hundred and show guys how to bat in those conditions.

“There’s been a lot of talk in Australian media around, ‘Gee, there’s not much coming through’.

“Well, we’ve come over here with a super inexperienced side who had not played in those conditions and nearly beat an Indian team that had eight guys that (were in the squad for) their next Test match.”

Some might argue they put up more of a fight than the West Indies team India’s main side thumped by an innings and 40 runs last week. Rahul, fresh off a hard-nosed encounter against Paine’s men, tonned up against them too.

Paine believes several of his ‘A’ tourists who have held their own against a more seasoned group of Indian players can help Australia in their away 2027 Border-Gavaskar Trophy series that is now little more than a year away.

The 35-Test former gloveman praised the BCCI for rolling out the welcome mat by not only ensuring they encountered formidable opposition, but also the match and training conditions they enjoyed on the three-week trip that concluded Sunday. He said players had been exposed to both red and black clay pitches across the two four-day matches and three one-dayers.

“Chatting to guys before we came over, they had no idea that there were two different types of clays in India,” said Paine of the soil consistency that can have a major bearing on the character of pitches India.

Chief among the notable performances with the bat in the first-class matches were Sam Konstas in scoring his maiden hundred abroad, a brisk 109 in the opening game, Nathan McSweeney finding form in the second with gritty scores of 74 and 85, while Josh Philippe (123no, 39 and 50) also shone across both. All three are pushing for returns to international cricket having had a brief taste of it. 

Cooper Connolly came into his own in the white-ball matches, putting up scores of 64, 50no and 33. Mackenzie Harvey (68, 70no and 7 in the one-dayers) and Jack Edwards (80-plus scores in both formats, plus a four-wicket haul in the first one-dayer) were also impressive as the Aussies won the rain-affected second 50-over game and pushed the Sheryas Iyer-led hosts in the third.

With the ball, South Australia speedster Henry Thornton rocked his Test-calibre opposition with an incisive four-wicket haul in the second four-dayer, while spinners Todd Murphy and Corey Roccicchioli toiled manfully having been given the uncommon task of bowling long spells in tandem, spinning the ball the same direction.

The more important lessons were harder to quantify.

Even before Thornton was hospitalised with illness during the one-dayers, Paine wondered aloud whether the more athletic members of his group can rethink their physical preparation to handle the extreme heat of the subcontinent.

In Lucknow, their bowlers were “absolutely spent” after two or three-over spells.

“We found a lot of our really fit, muscly guys struggled more than guys who had probably more your traditional cricket bodies, if you like,” said Paine.

“We have even been talking about some of the muscle that guys are carrying. Do we approach it slightly differently when we come here? Get them eating more food and arriving slightly heavier potentially?

“We’ve got a lot of guys in this next wave of Australian cricketers who have more the sort of AFL bodies that are cut from stone. While we love that in Australia – we want guys super fit and we want them to be complete professionals – where’s the balancing act if you want to come to somewhere like India and win?”

Campbell Kellaway, the Victorian bat who high-performance staff regard as one of the fittest Australian cricket prospects of recent times, was among those who were humbled by the north-Indian climate.

A taxing training hit before the first four-dayer prepared him in one sense – he chalked up 88 from only 97 balls in a blazing 198-run opening stand with Konstas – but left him sapped.

Paine saw it as a part of a wider issue that stems from traits universally lauded in their own home country, but which must be reconsidered on the subcontinent.

“He’s a sensational trainer. He’s very thorough and likes batting for hours which we love in Australia,” Paine said of Kellaway, who has since started his Sheffield Shield season with a duck against SA before playing a crucial fourth-innings hand.

“But he’s had days here where he’s lost seven or eight kilos and he’s been completely exhausted. For him to come here, learn that he can’t do that, and then hopefully, in 2027 when he comes back, he knows how to prepare in these conditions.

“As Australians, we love to train hard and we love to do big warm-ups. Just watching the Indian guys – and I’ve been watching this for 15 or 20 years – they’re the masters of conserving energy and being able to take games really late.

“We (coaches) can talk to them as much as we like about, ‘Hey, we need to take the foot off the gas here at training, or we need to be shorter and sharper in our warm-ups, because it’s 40-something degrees and we’re running out of energy’.

“In a way, we let them go and do that, to experience it for themselves. We hope now that they come away and go, ‘Gee, next time I come here, I can’t be warming up for an hour and a half or I can’t be hitting balls for three hours the day before (a game).”

Seeing India A’s reply in that first red-ball match was an eye opener, even for the likes of seamer Fergus O’Neill who spent 141.1 overs in the field as Test squad members Devdutt Padikkal (150 from 281 balls), Dhruv Jurel (140 from 197 and Sai Sudharsan (73 from 124) all piled on big totals.

“Campbell and Sam, they were taking quick singles and running threes to the boundary, and then Sai Sudharsan and Devdutt Padikkal came in in the second innings. They were hitting balls where we would have run two, but they just walked a single,” said O’Neill.

“We were a little bit taken back by that.

“Then, 300 balls later, when Padikkal was on 120, it kind of made sense. Little things like that, it’s good mental receipts to take.”

In the Sheffield Shield, the competition in which O’Neill was last season’s standout player, the 24-year-old never changes his clothes between spells. In India, he learnt it was a necessity.

They were not the only lessons for the bowlers, nor was the education limited to the subcontinental first-timers. Off-spinner Murphy, who has played Tests in Nagpur, Delhi, Indore, Ahmedabad and Galle, was perspiring so much in Lucknow he found it difficult to grip the ball.

“The biggest challenge for us was probably dealing with the heat and the humidity. It was bloody tough work,” Murphy said. “Personally, just trying to figure out different ways to hold the ball when your hands were slippery with so much sweat. That was a big challenge for me.”

Paine, in 2004 before he graduated to international cricket, had been a beneficiary of the old Australian cricket academy which was gradually phased out in favour of a system that sees states take on a greater role in producing and developing players.

While he remains coach of the Adelaide Strikers, he wants to stay involved in the ‘A’ program that went dormant during the pandemic but has gradually returned to prominence. This year they have had matches against the England Lions and Sri Lanka ‘A’ at home before the India trip.

The 2025 Australia A squad that toured India // BCCI

Paine will be in charge of the Prime Minister’s XI side that plays England this summer, as well as another ‘A’ contest between the Ashes rivals at Brisbane’s Allan Border Field. Intriguingly, it is scheduled to run concurrently with the second Test down the road at the Gabba.

The matches, he hopes, will help provide ready-made Test players in the coming years. Beyond this summer’s Ashes, beating India in India shapes as Pat Cummins’ men’s greatest challenge.

“We’ve been coming here as a cricketing nation for a long, long time and if we’re totally honest, the results over that period haven’t got a hell of a lot better, have they?” Paine said, speaking before he left India.

“Certainly in red-ball cricket, it’s an extremely tough place to come and win. In terms of the Test match conditions, it is extremely foreign, extremely challenging.

“It’s been my view for a while that we can’t just expect these young guys to come over here on a Test tour and expect them to be able to nail it without ever experiencing it beforehand.

“I know my era growing up, and the eras before that, you had the cricket academies, you had Australia A, and the importance of those experiences as a young cricketer to then lean on when you came back as a Test or international cricketer, they’re so invaluable. You can’t recreate it anywhere in Australia.

“You don’t make international cricketers by chance. You get some talent, you get the work ethic, the right attitude – all the attributes you need – but we need to be exposing as many of our best young cricketers to foreign conditions as we possibly can.”