Ahmedabad dream? Test proves fact can be stranger than fiction

“The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

Seventy years ago, the American Red Smith authored one of the most famous opening paragraphs in sports writing, which could credibly have stood for the crazy events in Ahmedabad on the second day of the third Test of this captivating, topsy-turvy series. Rub your eyes again and again and wonder whether it was all a dream; really, there is no way to tell it.

It was impossible to tear yourself from the action for a moment, as batsmen became completely mesmerised by the combination of spin and an extremely challenging pitch.

Seventeen wickets fell in the day, as England slid to a two-day defeat after a morning session during which Joe Root took five wickets in the blink of an eye, so raising hopes of a miraculous win.

It was England’s first two-day Test since they defeated West Indies at Headingley 21 years ago and the shortest completed Test match for almost 90 years.

After Root’s Test-best figures in the morning, England’s lowest score against India added further pain to the batting performance on the first day, which is surely where the game was lost.

Only three batsmen made double figures – nobody surpassing Ben Stokes’s 25 – and four made ducks.

It was a sorry spectacle but less blameworthy than the performance on the first day, and revealed a group of batsmen now desperately short of time at the crease, with all the lack of rhythm and confidence that results.

There will be the inevitable debate again about the standard of the pitch, as there was in Chennai. It was extremely challenging, as then, if not quite so crumbly in my opinion, with some balls turning sharply from the surface, and some going straight on.

For batsmen, a pitch where some spin and some don’t can be even more difficult than one from which there is consistent turn. Here there were 20 dismissals in all that were leg-before or bowled – confirmation of that challenge.

Under those circumstances, DRS adds an extra layer of difficulty, with which batsmen of previous generations did not have to cope.

After the match Root highlighted the extra lacquer on the pink ball that seemed to encourage it to hurry on from the pitch, while Virat Kohli rightly pointed out that too few batsmen were trusting their defensive technique under the pressure. All these factors can be added into the debate.

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If an ideal surface is a fair balance between bat and ball then this was on the extreme end of the bowler-friendly spectrum, for sure, but it was not dangerous and it produced absolutely fascinating cricket.

My view after the last game was that variety is a natural part of Test cricket, and that remains the case. This is India, where the ball spins, so find a way to deal with it.

Few balls misbehaved alarmingly and India waltzed to victory in the final session of the day, with Rohit Sharma finishing the game emphatically with a six. They didn’t look too inconvenienced.

It should be noted that England won the toss here and yet still lost. As last week, with the ball turning occasionally from the start, the toss was not a critical factor.

Instead, as in Chennai, India’s spinners were the difference: Axar Patel added five more wickets in the second innings to his six-wicket haul in the first, and Ravichandran Ashwin took four more, passing 400 Test wickets in the process and becoming the second-fastest bowler to that mark.

The ball from Ashwin to get rid of Ollie Pope, a lovely curling undercutter that went straight on and completely bamboozled the young Surrey batsman, encapsulated this wonderful cricketer’s sublime skill.

As for England’s selection, Root’s five-wicket haul in the morning, taken in only seven overs, suggested why criticisms of Dom Bess’ non-selection on the first day were wide of the mark.

Right now Root is a more accurate off-spinner than Bess and on a surface such as this, accuracy is everything. Where England erred in hindsight was not in selecting too few spinners, but too few batsmen, with the seamers acting as bystanders for much of the game.

With India now leading the series, and with the questions that will inevitably be thrown their way over the pitch, it will be very interesting to see what kind of surface is prepared for the fourth and final Test.

With three days remaining unused in this match, at least the groundsman will have plenty of time to roll it out. England will have to use that time wisely to try to rebuild the confidence of their batsmen, some of whom appeared shot here.

Where to start with the report of proceedings? With the madness and mayhem that accompanied the opening session, in which seven India wickets fell in 20 overs?

With the start of England’s second-innings reply, when Patel took two wickets in three balls, including, in between those wickets, a further decision given out overturned on review? Or with Root, who single-handedly brought his team back into the match with the ball?

It was a crazy morning session, for sure. The overnight batsmen, Ajinkya Rahane and Sharma, were dismissed in the opening half-hour, both to marginal leg-before calls that some of our more one-eyed readers simply refuse to accept have gone England’s way on this tour. Rahane was cutting, Sharma was sweeping and Jack Leach was the bowler on both occasions, benefiting from the straight line that had proved so productive for Patel the day before.

At the other end, James Anderson’s accuracy proved an able foil for Leach initially and then, when Root brought himself on to the left-handed Rishabh Pant, he produced a ball that spun and took the edge immediately.

Had Bess been playing, it is likely Root would have deferred but now Root’s first three overs, remarkably, brought three wickets without conceding a run, Washington Sundar following Pant to the pavilion, bowled by one that spun sharply, and Patel charging and driving to short extra cover. Ashwin fell sweeping, Jasprit Bumrah was leg-before and Root, with a smile as wide as the Humber, had blown the match wide open.

Then came reality. In a remarkable first over from Patel, Zak Crawley was bowled first ball and Jonny Bairstow bowled for a pair to his second, after he had been given out leg-before to his first. A sense of utter panic descended – Dom Sibley reviewed a caught behind to no avail – briefly lifted only when Stokes joined Root in a partnership of 31, but even then it always felt like a wicket was a flick of Ashwin’s fingers away.

Ashwin got Stokes, pushing forward defensively, for the 11th time in Tests; Root was fortunate to get a reprieve from the third umpire but was then beaten in similar fashion by Patel’s straight ball, and Pope, looking desperately frenetic, was completely flummoxed by Ashwin, who then picked up his 400th wicket when Jofra Archer fell sweeping a straight ball.

Time and again, the straight ball from India’s spinners proved to be the killer, another head-scratching element of a day that had even this experienced observer rubbing his eyes in disbelief.

The Times