ENGLAND TAMELY SURRENDER SERIES:
10 wickets gone in 55 overs in an all too predictable debacle. Can England learn from a lack of skill and muddled thinking?
THERE are predictable collapses — and then there are England’s batsmen in India. Over the past few weeks, life, death and taxes have had nothing on this lot.
The best that can be said about an innings defeat inside three days, handing Virat Kohli’s team a 3-1 victory and a place in this summer’s World Test Championship final against New Zealand, is that England have been put out of their misery.
The Ahmedabad pitch had nothing to do with the latest debacle. There was no pink ball skidding into stationary pads. The third umpire behaved impeccably.
England were simply outplayed, done and dusted by an Indian side somewhere near the peak of their powers and led by a captain in Kohli who makes up in aura what he lacks in acumen.
Dan Lawrence burnished his Test credentials with scores of 46 and 50 from No7, but there was little else to celebrate. Since stunning India in the first Test at Chennai, where Joe Root’s doublehundred helped them to the heights of 578, England have batted like mourners at their own funeral.
It was on Valentine’s Day that they began to fall out of love with the conditions, dismissed for 134 in the first innings of the second Test. Since then, they have made 164, 112, 81, 205 and now 135, a sequence that reads more like Root’s purple patch in the first half of the winter than the totals of a serious Test team. You have to go back to the 19th century to find such a grim string of English scores.
The final humiliation came at familiar hands. Spinners Axar Patel and Ravichandran Ashwin each grabbed five wickets, leaving them with 59 in the series at 13 apiece. Seven of their team-mates managed 21 between them. As two-pronged attacks go, this was lethal.
Patel is left-arm and mixes lavish turn with a hard-to-read arm-ball. Ashwin bowls off-breaks and plenty else. Yet the result is largely the same: Patel took five for 48, Ashwin five for 47. They have taken turns demoralising England and reached almost identical conclusions.
India, it should be said, have not been faultless. They were bowled out for 145 in the third Test and would have been 152 for seven on Friday had a close lbw shout from Dom Bess against Rishabh Pant gone England’s way. Only three of their batsmen averaged over 32.
But Pant’s subsequent century suggested a rare genius and Washington Sundar would have joined him had India’s last three wickets not fallen in five balls on the third morning, leaving him cruelly stranded four short of a maiden Test hundred.
By the end, England had succumbed to the fate of so many sides in this part of the world, ground down by the accuracy and skill of the spinners, on pitches designed to do their bidding.
Since losing to Alastair Cook’s team in 2012-13, India at home have been the nearest thing on the international circuit to a sure bet: 31 wins out of 38 Tests and only two defeats.
Root pointed out that England — having already beaten Sri Lanka 2-0 — had won three and lost three of their six Asian Tests. Despite their downward spiral in India, they would probably have taken that in advance.
But that does not mean questions cannot be asked of their selection policy and specifically their decision to rest and rotate big-name players for the most important England contest outside the Ashes.
The ECB’s duty of care in an era of congested fixture lists is understandable and the mental health of players forced to endure endless weeks in biosecure bubbles is paramount. But while the general principle is sound, the specifics have looked shaky. Take Jonny Bairstow, who was in decent nick in Sri Lanka, but then missed the two Tests in Chennai. When he turned his first ball yesterday from Ashwin to leg slip, it was his third duck in four innings.
And Moeen Ali, who in Chennai played his first Test for a year and a half, took eight wickets, then flew home, as per the pre-tour arrangement — just when England needed him most.
For fellow off-spinner Bess the repercussions were disastrous.
Dropped after the first game, he was prematurely re-selected for the last, when England misread the conditions for the second match in a row. The number of full-tosses Bess served up would have looked generous on the village green.
Jos Buttler, meanwhile, has been missing since the first Test, depriving England of one of the few players able to change a game in a session, as Pant did here.
Root was too diplomatic to condemn the arrangement, but it was hard to escape the conclusion that he was asked to beat India with one hand tied behind his back. Nor has the captain received enough support from the team-mates who have been available.
While the six winter Tests brought him 794 runs at 66, England’s next-best haul was Lawrence’s 248 at 27. Root alone reached three figures.
Zak Crawley, who began the latest procession by edging Ashwin to slip, averaged 12, and Dom Sibley, who was caught behind via short leg’s left knee, averaged 17.
For Ollie Pope, Ben Foakes and Rory Burns, who averaged 19, 15 and 14 respectively in Sri Lanka and India, the last few months will have to be put down to experience.
Again, too much was asked of Ben Stokes, who did his best to beat a stomach bug, top-scoring with 55 in the first innings, then taking four wickets. His dismissal for two, poking Patel to Kohli at leg slip, summed up England’s surrender.