Team India has many reasons to take Nathan Lyon seriously. After all, the New South Wales born spinner's greatest successes have come against them.
Ahead of the Melbourne Test, the off-spinner has taken 80 wickets against Team India in 16 Tests. This makes him Australia's most successful bowler against the Indians - more successful than Shane Warne, Richie Benaud, Dennis Lillee, Glenn McGrath, Jeff Thomson and all other famous and not-so-famous leather flingers.
The others might have hogged the spotlight. But fierce competitors that they all were, how they would have loved to give it all up to have a measure of Lyon’s successes.
Among spinners, only Muttiah Muralitharan with 105 wickets from 22 Tests has more Indian scalps against his name. Even this is a record seriously under threat going by Lyon's haul of 16 wickets in the first two India-Australia Tests of 2018.
The genial offie is also the bowler who has got Indian skipper Virat Kohli the most number of times in Tests - seven times in the 15 Tests they have played against each other.
The great Sachin Tendulkar couldn’t help but be impressed during the recently concluded Perth Test where Lyon emerged as the player of the match.
“Australia have got a very special spinner in @NathLyon421. He has got terrific variations and uses the pace and bounce from the pitch to extract maximum value,” Sachin tweeted. This after the Australia offie claimed his seventh five-wicket haul against the Indians in the first innings of the Test.
Team India beware. Lyon, while accepting that he was humbled by the praise from the little genius, refused to rest on his laurels. "I think I've still got a lot of improvement, a lot of learning about the game and about off-spin bowling. I believe there's a lot around the corner for me if I keep working hard and keep wanting to get better," he said.
It is this kind of attitude that has made Lyon reach the heights he currently has - without any fanfare, but with telling impact.
Before his debut, Australia's list of top ten successful spinners read as follows:
1. Shane Warne (leggie) - 708 (wickets)
2. Richie Benaud (leggie) 248
3. Clarrie Grimmett (leggie) 216
4. Stuart MacGill (leggie) 208
5. Bill O'Reilly (leggie) 144
6. Hugh Trumble (offie) 141
7. Ashley Mallett (offie) 132
8. Bruce Yardley (offie) 126
9. Ian Johnson (offie) 109
10. George Giffen (offie) 103
The most successful offie there was Trumble, who last played a Test in 1904 and whose greatest successes came on wet wickets in an age when cricket pitches were at the mercy of the elements.
Lyon's arrival on the Test scene in 2011 -- a year after he became a member of the groundstaff at Australia's spin-friendly Adelaide Oval -- has gone on to change all of this and how!
In the little over seven years since his debut against Sri Lanka at Galle, Australia's frontline offie has played 82 Tests and become the country's second most successful spinner ever. Only the peerless Shane Warne stands ahead of him.
Lyon at the moment is behind his great contemporary Ravichandran Ashwin both in number of wickets (342 to 334) and the Tests needed to get past 300 wickets (Ashwin's 54 Tests to Lyon's 77). But the length of their careers in terms of time is almost similar and interestingly the Australian is over a year younger than the Indian.
With the motto that “I've got a lot to achieve in my eyes” driving him, it will be interesting to see what he conjures up in the Melbourne Test – the last of 2018 – and in the years ahead of him.