England face playing the remainder of the fifth Test against India a bowler down after Chris Woakes injured his left shoulder while fielding on the opening day at the Oval. The 36-year-old was scheduled to have a scan on Thursday evening, with his ability to take an active part in the remainder of the game to be assessed overnight.
Woakes, the only English bowler considered fit enough to play all five games of a gruelling series, was clearly in considerable pain after landing awkwardly while attempting to keep the ball away from the boundary in the 60th over of a rain-affected day. After treatment on the field he was led to the dressing room with his arm cradled in a makeshift sling.
“It doesn’t look great,” said Gus Atkinson, who was the pick of England’s bowlers on his return to the team. “It’s a big shame, in the last game of the series. I’m hoping it’s not too bad and whatever it is he’ll get full support from everyone.”
Atkinson, who since injuring a hamstring in May has played one club game and once for Surrey’s second XI, said he was confident he could help the team’s remaining seamers cover for Woakes if the scan brings bad news. “I feel fresh, I feel good,” he said. “I know I’ve only got this one game to play, so I can push the limits a bit.”
Assisted by some wayward bowling, if not by a green-tinged pitch, several rain breaks and consistently threatening overhead conditions, India reached stumps on 204 for six, with Karun Nair unbeaten on 52 as he seeks to give a previously personally disappointing tour an ending brighter than the skies he was playing under.
“You look at the pitch, you look at the overheads and you think this should be easy for the bowlers, but it’s a ground where if you don’t bowl well you can go for a lot of runs,” said Atkinson. “It can be a tough ground to bowl on because of the way the ball moves – sometimes off the pitch, and it can swing a lot after it’s pitched. And the footholes weren’t easy. It was slippy out there and that can obviously affect the bowling.”
Ryan ten Doeschate, India’s assistant coach, defended the decision not to play the team’s star bowler, Jasprit Bumrah, in conditions that appear ideal for him and after their captain, Shubman Gill, had indicated on Wednesday that he remained under consideration.
“It’s quite a complex issue. We want to wheel him out but we also want to respect where his body’s at,” the Dutchman said. “He’s bowled a large number of overs. He did say coming into the tour he could only play three games and we felt it was right to honour that call.
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“Our thinking was the Oval’s normally a fairly good wicket for batting on, so we thought we’d roll the dice in Manchester. With hindsight we’d love to have him here. Maybe England have got it spot on, leaving the best bowling wicket for the last Test after he’s played three. For a tour of England you’d expect conditions closer to this than what we’ve seen in the first four Tests.”
England’s task was eased by a calamitous decision by Gill, the leading run-scorer in the series, to attempt a run after nudging the ball into Atkinson’s path as the bowler completed his follow-through and having scored only 21. “He’s in the touch of his life. Again today he made batting look really easy,” Ten Doeschate said. “But these mistakes do happen, and that’s a misjudgement of a run. Given what he’s done in the first four Tests we’ll let him get away with that one.”
