IND vs ENG: Why England, despite trailing by 238 runs, is in the driver’s seat

Though it was England that was trailing by 238 runs in the first innings and will be batting in the fourth innings, at the end of the second day, the pressure seemed to be on India. England had blitzed to 207/2 in 35 overs and threateningly for India, opener Ben Duckett was still out there on 133 with 21 fours and 2 sixes. The day and the game couldn’t have captured the stark contrast between the two teams’ approach any better.

One team wanted to win, the other wanted to hang in there, stretch the game, see where it takes. Usually that would play out in reverse: the foreign team would take the second approach, the home team would show who the boss was. Here, England walloped, India dawdled with the bat. England attacked with Bazbaiting on field with innovative tactics, India tried but were reduced to being mute witnesses to Duckett’s destruction.

“I wanted to clap for a couple of shots from Ben Duckett. Some of those slog sweeps were that good. But I am competitive and so I didn’t clap!” Ravichandran Ashwin would sum up the second day’s play with that rave as Duckett produced one of the most stirring counterattacks seen in this country recently by an overseas player to make India sweat despite making 445.

Ben Duckett, take a bow! 🙌

He achieves his 3️⃣rd Test century, also marking the fastest by an 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 batter in India! 🤯#INDvENG #JioCinemaSports #BazBowled #IDFCFirstBankTestSeries pic.twitter.com/u1BtaGs35M

— JioCinema (@JioCinema) February 16, 2024

The fall of Sarfaraz Khan, the only batsman who showed the quality of England’s spinners and the state of the pitch, through a horrible mix-up with Ravindra Jadeja would prove costly. No wonder Rohit Sharma was so aghast that he flung the cap in the moment last evening. Once Joe Root baited and trapped Jadeja with full-pitched flighters – he mistimed one and hit the next straight back to the bowler, India’s balloon was deflated rather early in the morning.

Impressive debut

They were on 331/7 and suddenly gripped with the prospect of being bowled out for a 375-ish score that would have been an utter disaster on this track. And so, the debutant Dhruv Jorel and Ashwin shut shop, trying to slowly inch towards respectability. The pitch still played fine – the odd ball kept low and there was some reverse as Mark Wood would later say, but Ben Stokes kept the pressure with imaginative field-settings to further choke India’s progress. “It was a bizarre day. At one point, India was going nowhere and they were stuck,” Wood would say, seeming genuinely perplexed by the proceedings.

There was nothing to be perplexed with England’s batting. The surprise at how they bat has long faded. Even the journalists from England would talk about once they saw England thrash over 500 on the opening day of the Rawalpindi Test (506 runs) in December 2022 against Pakistan, this approach has been normalised. A couple of journalists say that had happened even before that – probably when they beat India at Edgbaston Test in July 2002, chasing 378 in the final innings with seven wickets in hand at nearly five-runs an over.

Nerveless Jurel 🥶#INDvENG #JioCinemaSports #BazBowled #IDFCFirstBankTestSeries pic.twitter.com/nYn053BM5I

— JioCinema (@JioCinema) February 16, 2024

Still, this was India. Not a turner but as Wood said there were a couple of factors that made the bowlers feel they were in the game. But England were having none of it. “They have managed to increase the scoring rate through the series. They have also exploited the inexperienced batting line of ours. That’s two facets,” Ashwin would say. India’s hope rests on Jasprit Bumrah, who yet again produced a stirring spell in the evening troubling even Duckett with yorkers and slower ones. A yorker had induced an inside-edge past the stumps and another had rapped him on the pad but India’s DRS for lbw showed it had hit the toe end of the bat. Duckett’s response was telling: when Bumrah went for another yorker, and it ended up as almost one – really full low-dipping ball, Duckett crouched lower and managed somehow to cleanly whistle it past the bowler to the straight boundary.

India will now hope that the pitch, which has got increasingly slower, produces more variable bounce and turn on the third day. If England ran away to a lead and quickly at that, all the pressure would come crashing down on “our inexperienced batting line-up”.

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