The day started with drama and tension and later, for a while, they returned. But the period in between was in its own way equally intriguing, a phase that exposed in the tourists a deficiency not of quality, but of spirit. This turns out to be a team whose shoulders suffer from such severe premature drooping someone should invent some kind of blue pill to deal with it.
They started with spirits high and performance levels to match, Jasprit Bumrah from the Kirkstall Lane End and Mohammed Siraj coming up the hill from the other, lines and lengths unerring. Ben Duckett hit the third ball for four, after which seven overs passed before the next boundary.
Bumrah, as he does, produced a couple of absurd deliveries Duckett survived by little more than luck. His four-over spell brought eight runs, Siraj started with five overs that brought 13. In the first 10 overs Duckett faced 35 deliveries and scored six runs. The game was in the balance and teetering, mulling over which direction to fall.
It was India who toppled. Ten overs later, England had more than doubled the pace of their scoring, adding 58, and those shoulders had sagged. Shardul Thakur, a 33-year-old whose Test career runs to 12 games in seven years and whose performances are often as inconsistent as his selection, was brought on. Three overs and 17 runs later and having bowled with no consistency or apparent plan, he was hauled off again.
Later, he slipped in attempting to field at midwicket and stayed on the ground looking apologetic as the ball dribbled past him and away, allowing a sharp single to become an easy three. It felt a bit village.
India’s field changes were the definition of reactive, players repeatedly manoeuvred into the perfect position to stop whatever shot had just been played. They repeatedly tried to have the ball changed, though having learned from Rishabh Pant in England’s first innings – whose rather aggressive efforts had earned him an official reprimand overnight – they did so with an air of pitiful desperation. In the second block of 10 overs, Duckett faced 32 deliveries and scored 33 runs.
England’s target remained distant, but increasingly that was not how it felt: the scoreboard telling them they were 264 runs from far-off victory, but looking around them they saw a beaten team.
To describe India’s bowlers as a one-man band would be an insult to all those who are not Bumrah, but then Duckett’s treatment of Prasidh Krishna was pretty insulting. In the early afternoon, with a different ball – India’s pleas having eventually found receptive ears – and a different mindset, Krishna looked transformed. In the opening session, he looked lost.
Siraj is a fine bowler and a uniquely gifted physical communicator, fluent in every dialect of body language. Brought back for one over before lunch, he rattled through his full repertoire, strutting and posturing and fuming. He tried to hustle through his final delivery so six more balls from Bumrah could be squeezed in before the break. Zak Crawley, at the last moment, detected some movement behind the bowler and made him stop, sprint back to his mark, do it again and then miss the 1pm cut-off by a matter of seconds, fair stomping from the field. England departed to feast on hope, India on scraps.
after newsletter promotion
It got worse before it got better. Just after lunch, when Duckett edged between Pant and KL Rahul at wide first slip, Siraj did everything but self-combust. A few overs later Siraj, having changed ends to allow Ravindra Jadeja to aim at some encouraging patches of rough, bowled to Duckett who got underneath a pull and Yashasvi Jaiswal – who had dropped two catches in the slips in England’s first innings – ran in from deep square leg and dropped another one.
The rain that started to fall moments later appeared to slake the bowler’s flames and for a while, after the first of two rain breaks, everything changed – most obviously Krishna’s rhythm. Crawley edged him to slip, then Ollie Pope was bowled off the inside edge.
As Joe Root came out to join Duckett, India huddled and recommitted. Soon afterwards, Thakur conjured the dismissals of Duckett and Harry Brook with successive deliveries.
India never again allowed their spirits to drop as they had in the morning, but still they revealed something of themselves here, a game when their catching has been unreliable, their fielding often poor, their captaincy unremarkable, their batting a mix of feast, famine and failure – five centuries, six ducks, two catastrophic collapses – and their fighting spirit prone to sudden disappearance.
On the second morning, 430 for three at one stage, they luxuriated, and on the fifth they languished. This has been a humbling defeat and an embarrassing one.
