India 8 wickets from Vizag victory
CLOSING IN Ashwin, Jadeja strike late to remove obdurate Cook and Hameed in push for series lead
VISAKHAPATNAM: There comes a time once in a while when Test cricket raises itself above the need to be aware of results, strike rates, averages and simply boil down to a mental battle between ball and bat. In front of an audience attuned to a decade of Twenty20 madness, Alastair Cook and a teenaged Haseeb Hameed bedded themselves on an unpredictable pitch and took their hosts to a time warp where batting didn’t necessarily mean scoring. Both openers were lost to the cause of batting out of time but as a result of their resilience, England now are left with a chance of saving the second Test here.
Jonny Bairstow had sounded ambitious on Saturday when he said the game could change if England could take four wickets in the morning. They ended dismissing all seven in an extended session. Stuart Broad bowled leg-cutters with the gumption needed to ignore a foot injury and take four wickets on a pitch that had variable bounce. Adil Rashid too bagged four wickets as India slumped to a total that just about met their target. Barring a captain’s knock of 87 from Virat Kohli, India’s batting had nothing to boast of. Yet they had every reason to feel on top of the game by setting England a 405-run target, something that has never been achieved in India.
HIGH QUALITY
What however unraveled in the next two sessions was batsmanship of the highest quality as Hameed and Cook put their heads down to defending and denying India to the extent that they got impatient, wasted two reviews and even tried chatting up new batsman Joe Root. By the end of the day England snailed their way to 87/2 but this was never going to be an exciting run-chase Kohli would have prayed for. Having played far more five-Test series than India, England know well that trying to chase such a total at this juncture would be as bad as shooting themselves in the foot.
Their objective was simple — bat out five sessions with the sole aim of drawing the Test. Or as Broad put it later — ‘slow down the game so that it doesn’t feel like climbing a mountain’. And as template, England could take a leaf out of the books of Hashim Amla (25 off 244 balls), AB de Villiers (43 off 297) and even Faf du Plessis (10 off 97) who, faced with the impossible task of chasing 481 in the Delhi Test last year, came close to pulling off a draw. This is equally tough. First ball Hameed had faced — from Mohammed Shami — reared up so suddenly that he didn’t have time to back out. It hit Hameed hard but didn’t dent his confidence.Along with Cook, Hameed indulged a mind game so mature that it belied his age.
India threw everything they had at England. Umesh Yadav and Shami were given short spells. R Ashwin was bowled unchanged for 16 overs with Ravindra Jadeja playing his part with a better second spell. But for the two balls that finally got them, England openers looked sure about their stumps. They either left the ball or played hard at it in defence or working the gaps for singles. After a long vigil, Cook was finally found out by Jadeja’s delivery that drew him across the stumps and forced him to play a slanted shot. Hameed was unlucky in getting a ball that stayed low. Dismissed with strike rates (28.72 for Cook and 17.36 for Hameed) that could have had Cheteshwar Pujara facing selection trouble, the openers however know they have set up England for what could be a boring yet exciting fifth day.