7 min readLord’sJul 11, 2025 09:18 AM IST
First published on: Jul 11, 2025 at 12:39 AM IST
On a day of blazing sunshine, Lord’s was on a slow burn. After the frenzy of the first two matches, there has been a sudden drop in the pace of the game. It was back to conventional cricket at its spiritual home. The day that started with the England captain taking the time-tested decision to bat first after winning the toss, ended with England 251/4 giving the scorecard a very vintage feel.
Though he did play a few reverse sweeps, the top scorer for England was their most correct batsman, Joe Root. His 99 from 191 balls was an inning of patience and pragmatism. During his 191-ball knock, he faced just 23 balls from Bumrah and scored just 10 runs. It was wise to avoid a bowler who has got him 10 times in Tests and 4 times in white-ball cricket.
This was not the day for the new-age openers, the usual pace-setters of England’s Bazball cricket. Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley seemed out of place on the tough Lord’s pitch. Duckett (23 from 40 balls) and Crawley’s (18 from 43) knocks were a crawl and a struggle.
Was this the case of England slowing things to break India’s momentum after they bounced back in the second Test to level the score at 1-1? Not quite. After the two run-feasts on plain vanilla flat decks, Lord’s laid out a complex surface that had bounce but no real pace. The stroke makers didn’t have the freedom they enjoyed at Headingley and Edgbaston. So was this advantage India? Too early to say that.
The Indian batting line-up too has a glittering cast of audacious stroke players. Yashasvi Jaiswal, Shubman Gill, and Rishabh Pant will have to change gears to do well here. They would need to be more selective in their strokes and watchful. This is more of the KL Rahul and Karun Nair kind of pitch. Adding a layer of intrigue to the game was comments by the pundits. Some said that this Lord’s pitch gets a touch quicker on Day 2 but slows down on Day 3. It was all complicated. In a nutshell, this was a pitch where about 400 in the first innings was a good score.
The change in the pattern of England’s run-making proves this is no easy pitch. In the second Test at Edgbaston, wicket-keeper Jamie Smith, England’s very own Adam Gilchrist, sprinted to a 100 before lunch. At Lord’s, England crawled past hundred 10 overs after lunch. Their run-rate of 2.8 was the slowest the team has played in the Bazball era.
For most part of the morning, Bumrah found himself pitted against Ben Duckett, the left-handed opener who tried to play his favourite cut shot behind square. Not on this pitch. Here the ball took its sweet time to reach the stumps. The batsmen, used to true surfaces, were finding the going tough. Duckett would try to flash but would miss. He would try to come in the line of the ball and glide but the stroke wouldn’t have the speed to beat the fielder. And then there were those Bumrah deliveries where he suddenly cranked up the pace. One such ball hit Duckett in the abdomen. He doubled up next to the pitch in pain.
From the nursery end, Akash Deep was troubling the right-handed Crawley. They were involved in a little cat-and-mouse game. The tall Crawley would stand at least a foot outside the crease to cut the swing. To counter that move, Akash Deep would pull his length back.
Crawley would react to it by walking towards the bowler with the intention of meeting the ball early. That was stretching things too far – he would land in a position that wasn’t ideal to play a Test-class pacer. Totally out of position, he would mistime his drives. It was during this ‘up or further up’ dilemma, that Crawley would almost play the ball into the hands of Washington Sundar at short mid-off.
Crawley and Duckett were barely surviving, playing and missing. Disciplined bowling and the pitch gave them misery. They saw an opportunity when all-rounder Nitish Reddy came into the attack. Duckett was unlucky as he edged a rank bad ball that was drifting on the leg side. Crawley got the ball of the day. Nitish’s peach of a ball swung in and seamed a bit to take a bit of Crawley’s bat on its way to the wicket-keeper. The pressure built by the Top 3 pacers had worked for Nitish.
Spinners getting turn, bounce
Lord’s had more surprises for the batsmen. It wasn’t just tough to score against the pacers but even the spinners were getting turn and bounce on Day 1. A couple of balls before tea, Jadeja beat Ollie Pope’s front foot defense with turn and bounce. This was unusual. The ball seemed to have stayed in the England No.3’s mind even after he returned to the crease after the tea break.
Maybe, it was that ball which compelled captain Shubman Gill to continue with Jadeja at the start of the third session. The clever left-arm spinner would float the ball around the same length – slightly short of good length. Pope went for a squarish drive, rather than straight, his bat more vertical than horizontal. Jadeja’s ball turned but it was the bounce that saw the ball take the top edge and land in the wicket-keeper’s gloves.
India, meanwhile, too was having a strange day. Their 140-kph-plus pacer troika of Jasprit Bumrah, Akash Deep, and Mohammed Siraj went wicketless in the first two sessions. After getting his wicket in the last Test, Washington Sundar continued to trouble Ben Stokes with his drift. But once the new ball was taken after 80 overs, Stokes and Root seemed in control. India would hope Friday is a new day. They would want to strike early. This is not an easy pitch and Rishabh Pant too is injured, with no clarity if he will be able to bat or not.
England's Joe Root celebrates after scoring fifty runs during the third cricket test match between England and India at Lord's cricket ground in London, Thursday, July 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Pelham) 
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