The talk coming into this game was of needle, niggle and spite, of raising hackles and diminishing the spirit of the game, and beyond that of balls that lost their shape and days that lost too many overs. Somehow, 15 days of high-quality and largely compelling cricket had been distilled to the dominant themes of bad sportsmanship, bad workmanship and bad value.
Then, in the fourth Test of a series whose narrative had apparently been established, none of it. Not a single ball change. Entire days when every scheduled over was bowled. When Shubman Gill pulled out at the last possible moment as Chris Woakes ran in to bowl late on Saturday afternoon and the two briefly exchanged words it was as close as the game had got to an outbreak of bad temper. It amounted to little more than a scowl and came right at the end of its 304th over.
With an extended break between games it is no surprise the heightened emotion that characterised the second half of the last match had faded. But Gill’s response on Tuesday to a question about his part in the flaring of tensions at Lord’s suggested something of it lingered still. Several England players spoke with apparent pride of their in-your-face fielding in the last innings there, about how it had got people off their seats and glued them to their sets, and pledged that while they would not seek to manufacture malice, they would welcome and reciprocate any that sprouted organically.
Perhaps confusingly, England’s discovery of devilry coincided with the arrival of the former All Blacks mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka, most famous for instigating a “no dickheads” policy with New Zealand’s rugby union side. Happily there was no contradiction there. “A dickhead,” Enoka once explained, “makes everything about them.”
Still, such behaviour has been entirely absent. “You don’t always have to be nice,” Harry Brook said pre-match, but it is pretty hard to stop some people and Brook is one of those. Which is probably why, even in a ground that contains a 6,353-seater temporary structure known as the Party Stand, whose residents are often fancy-dressed and by mid-afternoon largely inebriated, the people who seem to be having most fun are standing in England’s slip cordon.
Brook is an excellent close fielder – the catch to dismiss Sai Sudharsan, straightforward as it was, was his 40th in Test cricket, not bad for a player yet to play his 30th game (in the past 50 years four Englishmen, of those to have played at least 20 Tests, have taken more catches per innings – one of whom, Joe Root, is normally standing beside him). But he brings much more to the side than that, much of it when there is no TV camera trained upon him, and not even any cricket taking place.
In breaks between overs in this match he has demonstrated his ability to throw his cap in the air and catch it on his head – a genuinely impressive skill – and persuaded Zak Crawley to try to emulate him (with somewhat embarrassing results); he has challenged other members of the cordon to sprint races; on Saturday he and Ben Duckett, positioned at gully, engaged in an extended period of broad-grinned bantering that ended with them hugging each other. He and Root were constantly chatting, joking and smiling, at least until the obduracy of Gill and KL Rahul scattered England’s fields and they found themselves too far apart to exchange small talk.
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Gill has demonstrated many faults over the past four days though, as he showed during his narrative-reshaping and potentially game-saving partnership with Rahul, there are few to be found in his batting technique. His is the team that most needed a bit of spark across their 157 (and a bit) overs in the field, but if there was something of the mongrel about them at Lord’s, here the only spirit animal they managed to summon was a sloth.
Having had all night to ponder their passivity on Friday they returned for the end of England’s innings with approach completely unchanged. There were times, as an evidently unfit Ben Stokes added another 95 runs to his team’s total alongside the No 10, Brydon Carse, when India’s fields seemed to be deliberately set to allow easy scoring, to make their opponents as comfortable as possible. They had somehow gone from red rags to red carpets.
The balls may no longer be going soft and out of shape, but instead it seems to be happening to entire teams. There is still time, at least, for yet another narrative to be reversed.
