Great to see Mo show more guts than glory
IAM NOT convinced Moeen Ali is a No 3 in English conditions but I have a lot of admiration for the way he toughed it out on the first day of the fifth Test.
Usually he is pleasing on the eye, a player capable of scoring a fluent double-hundred, as he did for Worcestershire against Yorkshire recently. Here he could hardly lay bat on ball but he was willing to battle it out. And, as the England collapse showed, it was not an easy afternoon for batting.
Often with Moeen, he’s walked off after playing a loose drive, or been caught on the hook with three men out in the deep on the leg side. By his own admission, he’s had a few brain fades. So I was pleased to see him play an innings a lot of us thought he probably didn’t have in him.
And make no mistake, India bowled brilliantly after lunch, when Moeen and Alastair Cook were made to work so hard for every run. They have three outstanding bowlers to left-handers and there were no gimmes.
If they hadn’t dropped both batsmen with the total on 68, England could have been in even worse trouble than they were at the close.
Yes, the partnership between Cook and Moeen was on the slow side but we’ve seen so many times with this England team how they look to hit their way out of trouble. So I don’t have a problem with a different sort of approach. At 133 for one, it didn’t look too bad. d. Then Joe came Root hasn’t collapse. looked at his fluent nt best this summer er and that’s why y he’s back at No 4. It is the position he feels most comfortable in and that’s fine with me — he’s England’s best batsman so it t is important he feels that way.
Earlier in the series eries he was struggling to line Jasprit Bumrah up andd playing l at balls outside off stump that he should have left alone. In the last Test at the Ageas Bowl, he took an off-stump guard and lined him up better. So what did Bumrah do here? He went for a big booming inswinger early on and it worked a treat.
Moeen has to be a bit careful. One stat suggested that until 2016 he was averaging over 100 in Test cricket against the straight ball. But in the last two years that figure has gone below 20. He is falling over to the off side a bit, probably because he’s going across his stumps to cover the outside edge, and is then being done by the straight ball. As with Jonny Bairstow, though, I wouldn’t get too hung up on the fact that both men made ducks in their favoured positions. The ball that got Bairstow was an absolute beauty from Ishant Sharma.
After facing criticism in Southampton that he was staying too leg- side of the ball, Bairstow probably tried to correct that by going back and across here, but there was nothing he could do about his dismissal.
The ironic thing was that, of all the England batsmen here, the one who looked the most at ease was the bloke who has decided to call it a day. If you had been on another planet this week you would have struggled to work out that it was Cook who is at the end of his career.
No one has ever doubted that he could still score runs at this level. It was more a case — as he himself said — of not having the will to grind out a score, as he did here. He will now have one more chance to remind England of what they are going to miss when he’s gone.