Bashir turns it England's way

Ranchi: A day which began as a battle of the old heads eventually turned into a tussle of youth. 

With this progression providing the fabric for the second day’s play between India and England in Ranchi, the visitors took control of the fourth Test. 

It was not unexpected after England ended the opening day on 302 for 7, and finished their innings on 353 all out in 104.5 overs, but watching India wilt on a pitch which was bespoke for their success, must have been a deflating sight for coach Rahul Dravid. 

India ended their response for the day on 219 for 7 from 73 overs with Kuldeep Yadav (17 n.o.) and Dhruv Jurel (30 n.o.) holding fort. England have an advantage of 134 runs. 

This doesn’t look good for India, and their decision to leave out Jasprit Bumrah as a workload-management mandate looks even more silly, but as far as a day’s play goes, it enthralled a decent smattering of crowd. 

It saw Joe Root add a few runs (122 n.o.) to his overnight score of 106 but his dreams of another big century went cold once Ravindra Jadeja picked up the last three English wickets. 

While the left-arm spinner finished with figures of 4 for 67 from 32.5 overs, the more pertinent factor was how the new ball was behaving. It showcased the kind of bounce and turn which was rarely there when he and R Ashwin operated the previous day. 

Softness of the ball, Akash Deep noted last evening, was what was making batting comfortable. 

India would have expected the same, and it sure looked like that when Yashasvi Jaiswal (73) and Shubman Gill (38) got into a rhythm, but Shoaib Bashir wouldn’t let them get comfortable on a pitch, even on a pitch which was beginning to behave itself. 

Turn and variable bounce became integral components in Bashir’s stellar figures of 4 for 83 from 32 overs, and the reason he was able to extract that much from the surface when others barely rolled their arms over was the speed at which he was releasing the ball. 

At pace, the ball was zipping off the cracks, and when it did come in contact with bald patches on the surface, it would straighten. In this way, he was better at exploiting the pitch than Ashwin did in his spell of 22-1-83-1. 

That’s not to say Ashwin won’t rework his speed of release for the second innings, but the fact that a 20-year-old with seven first-class games under his belt humbled India in their backyard is interesting. 

Even Tom Hartley had them in a fix in the first Test in Hyderabad, the one India lost, but in the two Tests which followed, they looked better against the spinners. Not on Saturday though. 

After James Anderson pushed his creaky body to scalp a crucial wicket of Rohit Sharma, and Ollie Robinson bowled as if playing club cricket, the spinners came on. 

But, who would have thought that someone so young and so inexperienced could bowl 31 unchanged overs with that level of accuracy, and potentially change the course of the Test!

Skipper Ben Stokes did. England did. Now, it’s time for the rest of the fraternity to.