WHITEWASH TO WHITE FLAG
A week ago Root was dreaming of a 5-0 series win. After losing 10 wickets in a session, England have gone from...
So much for England turning up at one of their favourite grounds and rolling India over again to win the series. Instead this has become their second successive Nottingham nightmare.
It was here at Trent Bridge that South Africa thumped England last year to burst the bubble of optimism over Joe Root’s new Test reign and now they have been utterly outplayed by India in conditions they should normally relish.
England go into the third day of the third Test with India on 124 for two in their second innings, a massive 292 ahead and almost certain to go on to a victory that would propel them back into this series.
All the progress England seemingly made in winning their last three Tests (is it really just a week since Root was talking of a whitewash after a thumping Lord’s win?) has counted for nothing here, where India’s bowlers have shown them the right lengths to bowl when there is help both through the air and off the pitch.
But, much more pertinently and worryingly, is that England’s batting has again been exposed as lacking the discipline and technique to cope against the moving ball, plus the patience to build big Test innings.
It says everything that this was the third time in less than two years that all ten wickets in an England Test innings have crashed in a single session, this latest debacle was following those in Dhaka in 2016 and Auckland this march.
This stunning collapse even came after Alastair cook and Keaton Jennings had made a decent start to England’s reply to India’s 329 with their first halfcentury opening partnership of 2018.
The most damning indictment of both the way England batted and bowled was that it was the unlikely figure of hardik Pandya, who has not appeared quite good enough with bat or ball in this series, who became India’s destroyer. All Pandya did was bowl a full length at a lively pace and let the ball do the work as batsman after batsman had neither the nous nor the footwork to stop him recording the exceptional figures of five for 28.
This was a triumph, too, for Rishabh Pant, a young keeper-batsman of immense promise who followed his audacious debut innings featuring a six off his second ball by taking five catches in his weaker suit with the gloves.
There was also sharp catching in India’s slip cordon in the form of KL Rahul, who pouched three chances, one of them controversial because it was another low effort adjudicated on unsatisfactorily by two-dimensional TV cameras.
It was an important one, with England captain Root possibly attracting the attention of match referee Jeff crowe for angrily swishing his bat and shaking his head when Rahul’s effort was judged to be clean.
Yet Root did not have any cause for complaint and was perhaps just frustrated at getting out to Pandya because all cricketing logic and available evidence pointed to the catch being absolutely fine and the umpires spot on.
There was no such doubt when Rahul then caught Ben Stokes and cupped his ear to elements of a Trent Bridge crowd that had booed him for rightly claiming the dismissal of Root.
If England were wrong to pick Stokes here so soon after his trial for affray in Bristol for moral reasons, then these chastening two days for him have also proved they were absolutely wrong to pick him for cricketing ones, too.
Even though Stokes bowled Rahul when India batted again, this Test — barring any second innings miracles — has come too soon after the strain of seven days spent in court with his future on the line.
It does not take hindsight to have predicted that and Root, Trevor Bayliss and all at EcB are culpable in making a bad call.
Not that the selection of Stokes has cost England the Test and turned Sam curran into a worldbeater but it has clearly disrupted the equilibrium of a team who had looked so dominant at Lord’s without him.
When England crashed to 128 for nine they were still two runs short of avoiding the follow on and had lost all nine in 20 miserable overs but at least Jos Buttler showed fight in hitting two sixes in his counter-attacking 39.
So effectively did Buttler shield Jimmy Anderson in their stand of 33 that India and their flammable captain Virat Kohli started to look a little ragged but sadly for England it was far too little and far too late.
England had wrapped up India’s first innings quickly in the morning, with Stuart Broad and Anderson taking the last four wickets for six runs between them but they found it much tougher going second time around.
And their plight was summed up by an awful drop by cook off chris Woakes that reprieved Shikhar Dhawan before he was undone by an Adil Rashid googly.
only one team in Test history has come from two down to win a five-Test series and that was Don Bradman’s Australians.
But surely now Kohli’s India will at least give themselves a chance of pulling off something special at Southampton and the oval.