India post hard-hitting reply after Kuldeep five-for wrecks England
If, in a nutshell, England’s batting approach on this India tour has been to rack up their runs before they get a ball with their name on it, then in Kuldeep Yadav, they have encountered an opponent whose methods could not be more perfectly tailored to confound them.
Few spin bowlers in history have served up a greater frequency of wicket-taking deliveries than Kuldeep has now managed, for in rushing through to his first five-wicket haul of a quietly devastating campaign, he brought up his 50th Test wicket from just 1871 deliveries – faster than any spinner since Jonny Briggs in the 19th Century, and more than 55 overs more brisk than India’s next quickest to the mark, Axar Patel, the man who tormented England on their last tour in 2021.
In the series, he has 17 wickets in exactly 100 overs, with 9 coming in his previous 30 matches. Just as he had unpicked England’s batting in the crucial third innings in Ranchi, so it was on his watch that they disintegrated yet again, in tough but tenable batting conditions.
After winning what ought to have been a crucial toss, Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett endured a tough first hour in swinging conditions to lift England to 64 for 0 with their seventh 45-plus stand in nine partnerships in this series. That scoreline, however, was 175 for 6 by the time Ben Stokes had become Kuldeep’s fifth and final scalp, and ultimately 218 all out, once R Ashwin had marked his 100th Test with a four-wicket docking of the tail.
By the close, England’s sense of a missed opportunity had been comprehensively rubbed in by another free-wheeling century stand between India’s captain, Rohit Sharma, who endured to the close on 52 not out, and the Boy Wonder, Yashasvi Jaiswal, who charmed his way to a 56-ball fifty, including three sixes in four balls off Shoaib Bashir to lift his series tally to a scarcely credible 26.
During his innings, Jaiswal rushed past Virat Kohli’s previous record for most runs in a Test series against England (655). Having crossed the 700-mark en route to his fifty, he had Sunil Gavaskar’s legendary tally of 774 in the Caribbean in 1970-71, the most by an India batter in any series, very much in sight too. He charged past Bashir in a frenzied rush of blood after slapping his previous two delivery for four, only to be stumped at 57 with a third century in the series at his command.
Mercy, however, was in broadly short supply on a dismal day for England. The tale of the tape was a sorry one, no matter how thinly you sliced their latest batting collapse. They lost all ten wickets for 154 after Kuldeep’s first-over googly had foxed a free-flowing Duckett; On the stroke of lunch, Ollie Pope ran past a googly and was left stumped gruesomely – losing them their last nine for the 118th time.
Worst of all, however, was their mid-afternoon meltdown – five wickets for eight runs between overs 44 and 50, including – surely uniquely – three elite batters with a century of caps each, and not a run added between them in the space of ten balls, as Jonny Bairstow, Joe Root and Ben Stokes came and went with the sort of whimper that England’s no-consequences mindset had been intended to banish.
Bairstow produced an innings of raw emotion in his 100th Test – but as has been the case in a frustratingly unsatisfactory campaign, his blistering start was followed by a slow exit. After resolving to climb through anything in his arc, and mixing two sixes off Kuldeep with a fierce caught-and-bowled opportunity in a wild knock of 29 from 18, he stepped into a loose drive with the ball just outside his eyeline, and burnt a review as Dhruv Jurel snaffled the thin edge.
Root, by this stage, had quietly nudged along to 26 not out – precisely the sort of stealthy progress that has habitually been his calling card. But his equilibrium hasn’t been all that on this tour, the Ranchi century notwithstanding, and in Ravindra Jadeja’s subsequent over, he was nobbled by a classic two-card trick – a bit ripper to beat his outside edge, followed by the slider into the middle of his knee-roll.
Root took a belated and desperate decision to obtain a second opinion after HawkEye delivered the disappointing news, and Stokes confirmed England’s confused minds by the end of Kuldeep’s second over. England’s captain has cut a subdued figure with the bat all series long – his tendency to hang back in the crease to gauge the challenge before taking it on has, inadvertently, come to epitomise precisely the sort of fatalistic batting that his team would otherwise profess to avoid.
And so, just as he was attracting Jasprit Bumrah magic balls at the top end of the series, so he invited Kuldeep to attack him on his own terms here. A huge ripping legbreak past his outside edge was followed by an inch-perfect googly, which pinned Stokes on the crease as he flapped reactively across the line. England was too far down in the mire to be saved after a six-ball duck and his third single figure score in quick succession.
Ben Foakes grew to learn from his lack of purpose at Ranchi as he agreed with Shoaib Bashir to counterattack shortly after tea, but as Ashwin unraveled the remaining innings – before letting Kuldeep lead the team off the field in a sweet game of “you first, no you first -” – it was obvious that England had lost their best chance of exiting this challenging tour with pride intact.
Crawley again was England’s leading performer at the top of the league. For the ninth time out of nine, he reached double-figures with more composure than the early-morning conditions might have warranted, with his sublime reach on the cover drive yet again the stand-out feature of his innings. But, once again, he failed to convert a formidable start – falling this time for a series-best 79, his fourth half-century and the highest of three 70-plus scores.
Kuldeep, inevitably, was the man who prised him out, and it was a magnificent delivery to be fair – a tossed-up legbreak, high above the eyeline, that dipped, ripped and took out the leg stump as Crawley was lured into yet another of his cover drives, only to be carved open in the process.
But he had already ridden a fair bit of luck by that stage – including a tough caught-and-bowled chance in Jadeja’s first over, and a strangle down the leg side off Kuldeep moments after lunch that Sarfaraz Khan at short leg was rightly adamant should have been reviewed. On 29, he was able to overcome a leg stump umpire’s lbw shoutoff Mohammad Siraj, which was exactly the type of dismissal that had previously been targeting him in the series.
India’s quicks were generating 2.4 degrees of swing at that point, compared to under a degree in the four previous Tests. England had survived the storm and should have been able to take advantage of a surface which India have since proved to be full of runs. However, Kuldeep’s techniques do not allow for such bedding down. You don’t imagine there’ll be any let-up from hereon in.