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TOShe is Ashes, dust to dust: if Ashwin doesn’t catch you, Axar must. The whole cycle of English cricket rolls, or wobbly, from Ashes to Ashes. Management tends to forget about dust until suddenly it is there, exploding in their faces.
The pink ball test in Ahmedabad was supposed to be a red letter day for England’s sailors. “I can tell you,” Ben Stokes said beforehand, “Jimmy [Anderson], Jofra [Archer] and Stuart [Broad] They’ve been licking their lips. “Then, with a wicket between them, all they were licking was their wounds.
The headline that traditionally appears on these occasions, “England in a twist,” had fallen short. The entire team had 193 runs in the game, almost the same as their captain, Joe Root, had done in an inning against the same opponents three weeks earlier.
Where do they go from here? In the era of Covid-19, an answer is nowhere. They have to stay in the same room, practice on the same nets, hit in the same square. It won’t be the same shade, but it might as well be. When Virat Kohli announced, absurdly, that a strip on which neither team reached 150 had been “very good at hitting,” he was effectively saying, “Same again, please, outfielder.” Their last series against England ended in a (rather unfair) 4-1 loss. He’s surely aiming for a resounding 3-1.
So England has to assume another bowl of dust awaits them. This will probably mean another beating, but they can’t afford defeat. Can you pick a better XI? They can certainly choose a more suitable one. Leaving out the second spinner cost them nothing as Root pocketed a five for fantasy but distorted their strategy. Root was ahead to 42, with India, 117 out of five, already ahead. In the previous Test, he had called up his second spinner (Moeen Ali) after 13 overs in the first inning and four in the second. By the time Root, the captain, took Root, the pitcher seriously, when India hit again, it was too late.
After leaving Dom Bess and then insulting him in public by blurting out that Moeen had been asked to stay, Root is now able to rehabilitate him. It is a fringe call. “The uncomfortable truth,” said Nasser Hussain at the weekend, “is that Root really is the second best spinner.” But England’s least implausible path to redemption is for Root to make big runs, so they can hardly expect him to make 30 overs. Let Bess do the fieldwork, find her length, and stiffen the tail, which needs her tenacity.
The bowlers haven’t gotten it wrong: India’s batting average so far, 26.76, is the lowest in a series at home in five years. It is the hitting that has ruined the possibility of England being surprised. In the pink ball test, three absent friends were deeply missed. One was Jos Buttler, who was rested: surely he would have deduced, as his understudy Ben Foakes did not, that the mere challenge was pointless. Foakes faced more deliveries in the match than any other Englishman (86), matching just one of them for four.
The second lady was sitting in the Channel 4 studio: Alastair Cook. Rory Burns and Dom Sibley have some of his cursed temper, but almost none of his technique against the effects. The third flaw has that technique, only to be ignored. England’s best available starter in Asia is Keaton Jennings, who has two hundred in just five rounds there. On Saturday it appeared in another newspaper, analyzing the different types of sweeps. His account was painfully authoritative.
In the absence of Jennings, England will persist with Sibley and Zak Crawley. The good news is that they both got off to a bad start on this ride and then bounced back: Sibley with a tenacious 87 in the first test, Crawley with that dreamy 53 in the third. The bad news is that Sibley has now backtracked and Crawley has fallen to twist his left arm six times in a row. If Axar Patel is to take the new ball again, Crawley, who is primarily concerned with effortless limits, needs to push in some crafty singles.
As former masters of hitting collapse, England have plenty of practice to bounce back. Their real surprises – 46 in Port of Spain in 1994, 51 in Kingston in 2009, 58 in Auckland in 2018, 67 in Headingley in 2019 – have been followed by strong performances from veteran players. Root and Stokes, who briefly threatened it on Thursday, need to dig deeper. Jonny Bairstow, who seemed disoriented after two doses of jet lag, has to help. Of course, it is much easier said than done. But there is minimal chance of a counterattack and somehow the tribal elders must take advantage of it.
