Good morning and welcome to live coverage of day three of the first Test of England’s five-Test tour of India. Not many straws to clutch for England supporters from play on day one and two, bar Ben Stokes’ innings and ample evidence that the understandable desire not to overburden Joe Root with so much bowling that it impacts his batting has left them a bowler short. In six of the seven Indian dismissals so far only Bharat, leg-before to Root’s skiddy off-break, did not bear the batsman’s responsibility for his own demise. For 24 overs Root was comfortably England’s most dangerous bowler and his two for 77, contrasting with the combined figures of Tom Hartley, Jack Leach and Rehan Ahmed – four for 290, is a chilling thought given England’s reliance on inexperience and the rusty Leach for the rest of the series.
Sir Geoffrey Boycott likened England’s main three spinners to second XI players yesterday and there was a distinct echo of Graham Gooch’s “World XI at one end, Ilford Seconds at the other” in the comparison between the world-class trio of Ravindra Jadeja, Ravichandran Ashwin and Axar Patel on Thursday and Friday’s Englishmen.
Nonetheless, everyone has to start somewhere and there’s every chance that Rehan, in particular, will develop into a fine all-format player. A tour of India, however, ain’t no kindergarten and once again the paucity of spin talent in the Championship and a complete, institutional failure to provide a structure for it to flourish is glaringly exposed.
In 2016-17 they went with Moeen Ali, Adil Rashid, Gareth Batty, Zafar Ansari and Liam Dawson and still came up short. We can point to the captaincy and selection issues that let Adil and Batty down in red-ball cricket over many years but the story is still the same: you have to nurture the talent at home you are going to need on the subcontinent, rather than just throwing it into the fray in isolated series every couple of years. Ditto 2020-21 with Dom Bess and Leach.
None of that should take anything away from India and Jadeja’s innings in particular. So often thought of as flashy and hence insubstantial with the bat, he has been a formidable Test batsman for the past six years and played a wonderfully measured and mature knock yesterday, artfully going from aggressor to anchor, a reverse-Stokes, over its course. If he maintains his excellence with the ball, England could well be heading to Vizag two days early.