The 1990 football World Cup was not, in truth, a great tournament, but it was a tournament of great moments, and in time they became all that was remembered. An often dreary event to live through – no World Cup has had an average fewer goals per match – it was rescued by the most remarkable of all curtain-raisers, Benjamin Massing’s assault on Claudio Caniggia, Roger Milla’s dancing, René Higuita’s goalkeeping, Lothar Matthäus’s wonder goal, David Platt’s volley, Frank Rijkaard and Rudi Völler, Gazza’s tears. In the end, these moments are all that get remembered. It has gone down as a classic.
This series has gone through the same process in fast forward. Marked more than anything by players bravely hauling themselves beyond the brink of exhaustion on flat wickets, it has simply produced too many great moments to not in fact be great.
Already the longueurs have fallen from the memory, leaving only legends: Rishabh Pant’s acrobatics; the Headingley run chase; Shubman Gill’s 269 and Akash Deep’s 10 wickets; Jofra Archer striking with his third ball back in Test cricket; time-wasting, fury, “the spirit of the game”; Shoaib Bashir winning a Test with a freak wicket taken while bowling with a multiply fractured finger; Pant limping out to bat at Old Trafford; a cameo from future pub quiz question Anshul Kamboj; Ben Stokes bowling his way out of the series with a barely functional right arm; India refusing to fold, or to accept the draw; four Tests (so far) going to the last session of the last day; the Oval groundkeeper Lee Fortis; Deep becoming England’s nightmare watchman; the dizzying narrative twists across the fourth day here.
Thanks to a brief, heavy and deeply inconvenient shower this game, like all the rest, has gone to a fifth day, having seemed set to become the second of the series to end with India coming to terms with unexpected defeat. The words of Washington Sundar with one day of the third Test remaining still linger: “Winning a Test at Lord’s is going to be amazing. We’re sitting pretty.” A few weeks later and a few miles away, on Saturday night at the Oval it was Yashasvi Jaiswal who summed up his team’s thinking: “We are really confident. We just need to keep bowling in the right areas.”
Jaiswal, more than anyone, had every reason to think fate was on India’s side this time. He had been on 40, towards the end of the third day, when he sent the ball steepling straight to the fielder at deep fine leg – Liam Dawson, on the field because of Chris Woakes’s shoulder injury – who simply had no idea what was going on. Dawson sensed people turning in his direction, deduced he was about to be involved in something, needed only to work out what it was.
And then, in the most literal sense, it hit him. India led by 32 as the ball bounced off Dawson and on to the ground, and when Jaiswal was eventually dismissed deep into the following day he had stretched that to precisely 250. It seemed then that a moment of calamitous deep fielding would decide the game, and as the end came into view it still did. The only question was which one.
Mohammed Siraj has had a phenomenal series. No amount of praise could be too much. Nobody has bowled as many overs, taken as many wickets, given so much of themselves. Only slips and wicketkeepers have taken more catches. It was Siraj who Bashir dismissed to end the Lord’s Test, after he had faced 30 deliveries for four gutsy, stubborn, determined runs. Even his body language, his wonderful ability to physically express the situation in which he finds himself, is unrivalled. He has been magnetic, magnificent, an outsider who is simply unprepared to be anything but integral. And just as it seemed to have swung closed it was Siraj who thrust open the door for England to win the series.
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Harry Brook was on 19, and England still 237 runs from their target, when he attacked a short delivery from Prasidh Krishna. It was an ugly shot, leaden-footed, top-edged towards deep backward square leg where Siraj stood. He set himself for the catch, waited, watched, and safely collected the ball. Krishna spread his arms in celebration; KL Rahul sprinted from the slips to congratulate the bowler; Siraj took a step back, on to the boundary padding. Instead of raising a finger, the umpire raised both arms.
When Brook was finally dismissed – caught, inevitably, by Siraj, which even then felt more like cruelty than redemption – England needed only 73. In the final analysis Siraj seemed destined to have had a phenomenal, brilliant, inspiring, humiliating failure of a series. In the end, these moments are all that are remembered – but still there is time for a couple more.
