Now, I know what you’re thinking. Truth is I’ve thought the same way myself. India scored five centuries, their fielders dropped six catches, and missed two other opportunities besides. Their best bowler took an important wicket off what turned out to be a no-ball; Chris Woakes, the man leading England’s attack managed one wicket in the match; Josh Tongue, their big strapping quick, only dismissed one member of the opposition’s top six, and that was when he had already scored a hundred runs, and Shoaib Bashir gave up the large part of 200 runs. Oh, and England put the opposition in, and conceded the best part of 500.
And at the end of it all, they won. And this time the No 11 didn’t even have to bat. It was a match which they might well have lost. Maybe they should have. But it was also a match which any number of England sides before them wouldn’t even have tried to win. In the first 142 years of Test cricket England scored over 300 runs in the fourth innings to win a Test exactly three times, and in the past six years of Test cricket England have scored over 300 runs in the fourth innings to win a Test exactly three times, once when Ben Stokes scored his 135 here to beat Australia, and now twice when he’s been captain.
For Stokes, the odds are just the numbers in between the evens. England never even admitted the possibility that this game might be heading any other way. People sometimes ask what a player needs to do to get dropped from this squad. Maybe the answer is that they’d need to talk about whether they ought to play for a draw in a team meeting. On Monday night the players, and coaches, recoiled from the mere idea that they might have to consider it. They carried that ringing sense of conviction into the day’s play.
Long passages of the morning seemed to be taking place in a dream. Headingley had been wrapped in a cloud, and the city around the ground was lost from view, the lights were on, so it was bright enough despite the gloomy mood, and while it drizzled all through the morning no one seemed to think it was wet enough to stop the game. In the middle, England’s openers made the enormously difficult job of batting in such difficult conditions seem so uncannily easy that the first three hours of play passed like one of those Norwegian slow TV shows that consist of a live feed from the driver’s carriage on the 9.15am from Oslo to Bergen.
By the time everyone snapped out of it, roundabout the moment Shardul Thakur took two wickets in two balls in the mid-afternoon, England needed only another 118 runs, and had enough batting to come that the odd wobbles they suffered along the way barely raised the spectators’ heart rates. It was, by England’s standards, one of the more humdrum stunning victories, a quotidian bit of fourth-innings-delivery work. They made the improbable seem inevitable. When it was done, and Jamie Smith had belted the winning runs out over midwicket, all the criticism that came their way over the first four days seemed a bit beside the point.
Even so, you just know that there will be no end of people who want to tell Stokes “I told you so”. Their play in this game was a refined version of the way this team used to go about it; more cautious, for sure, and more willing to allow that there are moments in every match when batters need to dig in against a team bowling as well as India did at points in this fourth innings.
But English cricket still seems to be full of people trying to wrap their heads around it, who say they are staggered by his big decisions, who want to castigate his batters for getting caught on the boundary trying to hit a second six, like Smith did in the first innings, or give Stokes stick for getting caught playing a reverse sweep.
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In seven weeks we’ll see whether they can win this series, and in seven months we’ll see whether they can win the Ashes. English cricket is pitiless on teams that go to Australia and get beaten, and you can wager that if this lot end up losing then the team, and the management, will be torn up all over again. Whichever way it all plays out now, three years into Stokes’ captaincy, and one win into a run of 10 games that will define how it all goes down, it might just be time to stop worrying and enjoy it. They are the most entertaining Test team England have had in 20 years, and the most successful one they have had in 10.
