Posted by India have an amazing ability to take a bad day in the field and make it look worse. It’s a flat pitch and they managed to take five wickets (although none for the man with ‘the best wrist in cricket’) but yet it seemed far more horrendous than that.
Mostly it was Ishant Sharma’s fault. It wasn’t that he had a chance to catch Alastair Cook. It was more like he had a very, very difficult chance to drop Alastair Cook off this one particular delivery and somehow grasped that opportunity. His hands then figured they probably wouldn’t be needed for the rest of the day and were therefore absent for several subsequent fielding attempts.
Other players weren’t doing much better and so we would probably rate Alastair Cook’s run-out as being his biggest achievement of the series. He certainly played a key role by opting to flail his bat around wildly rather than grounding it.
If England declare early enough tomorrow, India will almost certainly lose this test.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. India’s lacklustre performance is mainly because their approach to test cricket has become largely one-dimensional. They simply don’t know how to proceed if they don’t have a ginormous first innings score. To a certain extent, this is true for most teams going around. Indian batsmen aren’t as good as they are made out to be, and Indian bowlers are not as bad as they are made out to be. They simply need to realize there’s more than one way to skin the cat.
More cats! (less skinning)
What india are lacking is a spin bowler who retired 5 years ago but totally could play, its just he’s really too busy these days continent hopping. Maybe if they dropped some of the requirements to play domestic cricket he could come back for a bit.
I know in the last series against the saffers we could have used one of those old botoxed wrecks to send down a couple of overs at an economy rate in excess of 20, if only for contrast.