Good morning and welcome to live coverage of day two of the fifth Test from Dharamsala. England have only to look behind the pavilion at the Himalayas to be smacked in the face by a visual metaphor of where yesterday’s shonky performance with bat and ball has left them. They have had some terrible days on tour in India in the recent past – Karun Nair scoring 232 of his 303 on day four at Chennai in 2016-17, bowled out for 134 and 164 in Chennai five years later, dismissed for 112 and 81, and 135 in back-to-back defeats at Ahmedabad on the same tour – but Thursday was by far the worst day of the Key-McCullum-Stokes era in terms of being outplayed.
Kuldeep Yadav exposed the holes in both their batting and their bowling. His mastery of his googly and the sheer exotic quality of the art of left-am wrist spin, bamboozled England’s best batsmen in the way all India’s spinners used to do at the start of tours of India. It seemed to this observer at least that they had not spent any time between Tests working out a way to confound him. He’s nothing new to them but to see them groping wildly and flailing suggests a touch of complacency about his threat. He has, of course, also improved immensely, proving, as in the case of Shane Warne, Stuart MacGill and Adil Rashid, that wrist-spinners take time to mature. Rehan Ahmed is not here, never mind in Kuldeep’s class. But he needs a long run of bowling, at home and away, domestically and internationally, as well as the backing he already enjoys, to develop.
So what does today hold in store? It looks before we start like the penultimate day of the Test. One would expect India to build a commanding lead and roll a demoralised England over. Steven Finn reckons England still have a slim chance – if they do they will need something special from Jimmy Anderson, including his 700th Test wicket, some fireworks from Mark Wood and wickets for their two rookie spinners to have any possibility of avoiding the 4-1 result that will always appear to readers of Wisden in 50 years time like a rout when, in truth, the middle three Tests were all on a knife-edge at one point.