India vs England 4th Test: Almost for India, but not enough in the end
In with a chance to script a memorable win, India falter at the crunch to hand England the series.
Knowing Kohli, this would hurt. He cares about winning and losing. The question, then, is what has this taught him and his men? (Source: Reuters)
Right through the chase, India had this angsty look of a forty-cigs-a-day man who had just given up the habit but was desperate for one celebratory puff at the end of the torture. But it was the burnt smell of defeat that they breathed in. This loss should hurt and teach. They have a band of men that comes close but falters, can’t cross over. That can be seen as a positive and this is a young team of course, but sometimes it’s the impatience and tired-of-losing sentiment that helps in flipping a team over.
They showed great character to come back from 0-2 to win at Nottingham but it’s one thing to do it when not many expect it and entirely another to do when the expectations and stakes are higher. In one word: pressure.
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Time will tell but this series must have taught them a few important things: How to win and how to lose a Test. Those little big moments which needed to be seized but when India froze. The batting collapse on the second evening when they could have wrapped up the game. The stutter at the start of the chase. The lack of heart (or self-belief?) after Virat Kohli fell. Not a coincidence that it was the batsmen who froze at Edgbaston and here in Southampton. It takes a certain sense of dare, the kind of spirit Sam Curran showed in both games to drag England from dire scenarios. Sometimes, it requires raging determination to prove a point like Moeen Ali. Dare, rage, nerves and a bit more: something out of the ordinary was needed, but India couldn’t produce those emotions. This should also hurt because this England team had presented one of its weakest squads at home for a while. Openers out of sorts, a captain who demoted himself from No. 3, Johny Bairstow who didn’t want to bat at No.4, a man who has been shuttling between court and cricket grounds, a keeper-batsman who had to perform to hang on to his spot, and Adil Rashid, a spinner who had shunned first-class cricket before the series. Yet, somehow, they did just about enough to win. They had a very good bowling attack, of course, and unearthed characters like Curran who captured hearts and seized moments. It was apt that it was the boy who took the final wicket and experienced the thrill of delivering the series-clinching moment. And this is just his first full series.
Sometimes, it requires raging determination to prove a point like Moeen Ali. (Source: Reuters)
Knowing Kohli, this would hurt. He cares about winning and losing. The question, then, is what has this taught him and his men? And how they react would shape up India’s immediate Test future. But that’s up in the air, time to return to the here and now. To the chase.
The best part of it began after three wickets fell in a hurry. Kohli and Ajinkya Rahane kept India from tilting over without a fight. The stand had everything: heart, game-awareness, temperament, lot of skills but it also had an unmistakeable sense of inevitability of loss around it. One wicket and you knew it would be all over. Especially Kohli’s, just like at Edgbaston.
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The effect of Kohli’s presence, who was albeit fortunate to stay that long as third umpire Joel Wilson incredibly missed a straightforward lbw decision when he was on 10, was such that Rahane seemed a different player after Kohli fell. Until then, he was the more assured of the two. Clarity of mind sparkled through: he was either fully forward or back to the spinners, he cut out the past tendency of pushing an open face of the bat (the bat would almost face the off side) to the off-spinners, and did his best not to get locked (until the ball he got out).
Out lbw in the first innings, the dismissal that started the rot and turned the match, Rahane opened up his stance in the chase to James Anderson and Ben Stokes. A tiny shuffle of the front leg as the bowler delivered got him back to a side-on position but the open stance also ensured he wasn’t playing around the front pad.
Kohli and Rahane made England fight hard and the hosts seemed ready. Moeen, what a game he had! Shunned to oblivion under Joe Root’s captaincy, he wasn’t seen either as a batsman or the main spinner. The thinking was that he would only play as the second spinner. What does he do? Goes out and takes his frustrations out in county cricket, scores a double hundred, bowls lots of overs and storms back with a nine-fer. He is even asked to bat at No.3 — no greater vote of confidence from the captain than that.
How well he bowled in the chase! The right speeds, always on and around the rough areas — Ashwin had failed to do that — and relentless attack.
If there was one thing Kohli and Rahane could have done differently, it was the ability to manoeuvre the ball around against Moeen.
If there was one thing Kohli and Rahane could have done differently, it was the ability to manoeuvre the ball around against Moeen. If it was Sachin Tendulkar out there, you could have bet he would have pulled out the paddle sweep and made the spinner re-think. Kohli doesn’t sweep much but after one aborted attempt, Rahane pulled down the shutter too. They pressed forward in defence, went back to defend – but didn’t do much else against Moeen. Not wise on this track as Kohli found out: one ball broke in from the rough, squeezed through the defence, brushed the glove and bounded off the pad to short-leg.
Once Kohli left, the fight evaporated. Rahane found himself on the back foot, locked in a position he had tried so hard not to entangle himself into, and was trapped in front. The rest was an understandable blur: after his first-innings coma, it was expected that Rishabh Pant would go down attacking. He did. After his first innings dismissal, it was expected that Ashwin would pull out the reverse sweep at some point. He did. Hardik Pandya, the batsman, gives the air of a batsman who trusts his defence a lot more than he should, as of now.
In the end, Kohli came to meet the press. He wasn’t angry or overtly hurt, he was almost a statesman of sorts but right in the end, his weariness came through. “We can look at the scoreboard and say we were only 30 runs away or 50 runs away . we have played good cricket but we cannot say again and again to ourselves that we have competed. When you come so close, there is an art of crossing the line as well, which we will have to learn. We have the ability, which is why we are getting close to a result, but when a pressure situation comes, how we react to it is something we have to work on – and everyone is ready to work on that.”
There can be no better summation than that of this series for India. Good but not good enough. There but not quite there. When the boys get tired of this, things will change.
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