Anybody who has to rely on match reports to know what's going on on a cricket field could be forgiven for thinking that cricket is basically a gladiatorial arena for batsmen. If the reporters who tell us about the game were writing about gladiators, they would ignore the lions, the spears, the clubs and the swords altogether. It's as though cricketers appear stark naked at a cricket ground surrounded by concrete stands full of paying spectators and reporters. If they survive the parade, it is reported that they are successful, if they don't, it is reported that they are inferior. One esteemed commentator, who has never been known to challenge the powers that be, and has previously written about the futility of expressing an opinion about the political economy of the game ("only the bean counters matter") told his 1.36 million followers that India's cricketers "carry the air of a team that is waiting for the series to end".
What would the people who invented modern sport as an arena in which a person's character, ability and skill would be tested think about all this? The people who are paid to describe the test seem to ignore it altogether. When was the last time you heard a description of a Test Match in which an actual test was described? Has winning and losing begun to matter so much that the very thing being won and lost no longer matters?
10 wickets fell on the first day at The Oval. England are at their strongest with the new ball in this series. As the series has progressed, the wickets have become greener, more English. Rain has helped. After the slow, low pitch at Trent Bridge, India have played on a green top at Lord's, a very good batting wicket at Southampton (which offered some uneven bounce late in the match), the quickest pitch of the series at Old Trafford, and now a slowish, green wicket at The Oval. The Old Trafford and Lord's wickets have been the seam bowling equivalent of the Mumbai pitch when England were last in India. The Oval wicket is more akin to Kolkata than Mumbai - its slower and has less carry. With the exception of Lord's, England's bowling attack has done well every single time in these classical Home and Away encounters. India's weakest batting display, in my view, came in the 4th innings at Southampton.
James Anderson and Stuart Broad know how to bowl in these conditions just like Anil Kumble knew how to exploit the dry bare wickets at the Kotla or Eden. More than any recent English bowler, Broad and Anderson are perfectly suited for these conditions. Perhaps Mathew Hoggard came close. But even Hoggard at his best never had a partner at the other end who could match his lethal length and late swing. His partners tended to be bowlers who hit the pitch hard - Flintoff and Harmison. Stuart Broad has been England's best all-wicket bowler in the last 3 years in my view. He's the rarest of fast bowling species - an exceptionally tall fast bowler who can pitch the ball up and move it late. Andrew Caddick was also tall, but he tended to get swing from the hand rather than late, in the last third of the flight.
For a batsman, there is only one reasonably sure method of countering this style of bowling. Read the length early, play well forward or well back, and play as late as possible. Pace and late movement make playing late very difficult. Bad form makes picking the length and line early more difficult. Cheteshwar Pujara and Virat Kohli have tried to play this way. They are hard wicket players, brought up to hit the ball at the top of its bounce - to trust the line of the ball. On wickets where the ball doesn't move late, it is not profitable to move fully forward or fully back. It is possible to hit through the line and even, should the occasion arise, across it. Murali Vijay, the only classical opener in the Indian line up has coped with the moving ball better than any other Indian batsman.
What has hurt India is the gaping hole at the top of their order. Gautam Gambhir has shown himself to be the player who Shikhar Dhawan replaced, and not the player should replace Dhawan. He was brought in just as Dhawan seemed to have worked out a method of playing Anderson and Broad. His first ball leave today was not half-hearted. It was not lackadaisical. I think what happened is that Gambhir picked which way the ball was going to swing as well as the length, and then decided immediately to leave the ball. At this point, his head dropped. He looked down instead of continuing to look at the ball. It was perhaps his misfortune that the ball kissed the outstretched bat. It was the dismissal of a batsman down on his luck, playing from memory, away from the thick of things.
In Test Matches the contest between bat and ball depends on a ball-by-ball basis on what the batsman is doing, or is able to do (and what the bowler is able to do). This is obvious on the face of it, but it doesn't make its way into description of the cricket very often. Cheteshwar Pujara's dismissal was one such occasion. Stuart Broad uses the classical approach when there is some help from the conditions. He probes away outside off stump, just short of a length and works his way closer to off stump. His stock ball leaves the right hander, or "holds its line" (as the misnomer goes). The variation is the ball which is slightly fuller and moves in after pitching. A batsman who is picking the line and length early is likely to master the off stump and draw Broad towards middle stump. This usually means runs on the leg side. Just occasionally, Broad finds the magic ball - the perfect length, pitched just outside off, and moving in between bat and pad - the gap opened mainly by the length. Against a batsman who is worried and uncertain about the ball leaving him just outside off stump, this can be deadly. An in form batsman will probably get a single behind square on the leg side off the inside half of his bat. Pujara has answered to the former description more readily in this series.
Where as Pujara has been content to let the ball come to him and cover the line of off stump to stay out of LBW trouble, Kohli's approach has been cover the line of the ball far more aggressively. This gives him more attacking options down the ground against the off stump line but it also exposes him to late movement - the kind of movement he wouldn't see on truer wickets in South Africa, Australia or India. It was this late movement which did him in against Chris Jordan. It was a reasonable decision by Umpire Dharmasena.
Mahendra Singh Dhoni survived and then took chances against attacking fields. He's better than most batsmen in the world when it comes to the calculated slog. I suppose one could say he rode his luck, but I'm not sure if this amounts to any more than simply saying that he continued to take his chances as long as they came off. The ball was also older by then.
Stuart Broad and James Anderson are masters in these bowling conditions, much like Anil Kumble was a master on dry wickets the Kotla or Mohali or Eden. The difference between India and say Australia, is that against India, England can prepare these wickets without fear. India don't have Ryan Harris or Peter Siddle or even Ben Hilfenhaus to exploit these conditions with anywhere near the consistency of Broad or Anderson. We've heard over the past weeks how Pankaj Singh bowls that one bad delivery every over. What isn't stated is that this lack of control also means that he (or Ishant Sharma or Varun Aaron) can't move his line and length by inches the way Broad and Anderson can. In these conditions, control over those inches is pure gold.
India are not waiting for this series to end, whatever Harsha Bhogle might tell you. They have come up against 2 excellent bowlers in conditions tailor made for those bowlers - tailor made with impunity because England know that India have nobody who can use these conditions as well. They have not had good answers against Broad and Anderson. Unfortunately, only one Indian batsman has had the luck to survive against them when the conditions favored them - Ajinkya Rahane at Lord's. Maybe that will change in India's 2nd innings. But can their bowlers get lucky and keep India in the game? They couldn't at Old Trafford - England's 7th and 8th pairs made 197 against them after their first 6 pairs had managed only 170.
On these wickets, against this bowling, perhaps Tendulkar or Dravid at their best might have produced a century or two even without good openers to blunt the new ball. Perhaps this might have been enough to put England's inexperienced line up under the hammer. But absent comparable fast bowling quality on India's side (look at the wickets South Africa played on in 2012, and Australia played on in 2013 and compare them with the wickets India have played on at Lord's, Manchester and now The Oval), nothing less than a potential all-time-great batsman can help India. Right now, India don't have such players. They have a promising line up which may do great things once it matures. Currently, Kohli, Pujara and co. seem to lack the guile or the imagination which experience brings to a seasoned top line Test batsman.
To see all this, one has to disenthrall oneself from the business of winning and losing. Reading cricket is much easier than reading minds. It is also far more interesting.
I wonder though, how would Sri Lanka, with the genius of Sangakkara, have fared in a longer series against summer?
To see all this, one has to disenthrall oneself from the business of winning and losing. Reading cricket is much easier than reading minds. It is also far more interesting.
I wonder though, how would Sri Lanka, with the genius of Sangakkara, have fared in a longer series against summer?