57/4 at lunch. They can still rescue this, but India have bowled well, and will probably be glad they didn’t bat first. If England can get to 300, it puts a bit of pressure on India.
245 to get.
Bit better by England in this second innings, with some actual performances by the batsmen along with the usual awfulness (I’m looking at you, Johnny Bairstow).
Sam Curran run out on 46, Joe Root run out on 48, Buttler top scores. India will have to play really well to get these, but there doesn’t seem to be much in it for the seamers this time around so they may well get up there.
England off to a reasonably sedate start, on what seems to be a straightforward wicket. Jennings was kind enough to pop up some catching practice to leg slip to get out.
But enough of that. This is Cook’s last England match. The end of an era. You’ll all have seen the stats. It’s a shame to see him go (albeit it is time) because he has done a hell of a job as England opener over 12 years. None more so than 235* at the Gabba - the beginning of a completely ludicrous series for him (766 in 7 innnings, FFS). For a batter with so few shots his statistics are a monument to a kind of stubborness that, perhaps as captain didn’t serve him so well, but enabled him to grit his teeth through tough times and push through until he got the results he expected of himself.
Anyhow, he’s 37 not out on a decent pitch so it’s a particularly important time to remember that life isn’t a fairy-tale.
gulps sniffs wipes at eye
See, told you it wasn’t a fairy-tale. No, you’re an optimistic old fool.
170/4 is an awful lot better than anything we’ve managed so far, even if it has been slow and we lost those 3 wickets so quickly. The highest first innings score in the series so far (by either side) was the 396/7 England got in the second test, and there we were 89/4, so we could be looking at something past 450 and boss the game.
Or we could be all out for 200, you can never tell
((171/5))
And once again England are bailed out by the lower order after another batting flop. This time they at least got to triple figure before collapsing, but you don’t win the toss and bat in a Test match to be 180/7, no matter what the conditions.
Can anyone remember - even from back in the 80s or 90s when England were outright bad - a bigger mess of an England top order than this one?
Last test of the summer, touring selections coming up, and they’re fielding Cook (in his last game), Jennings (test average 22), Moeen Ali (promoted from No.8), Root (badly out of form), Bairstow (promoted from No.6 and lost the plot) and Stokes (a dasher forced to play as a blocker). Are there really no promising No.2s, 3s, 4s or even 5s worth trying? (Pope, FWIW, was another promoted No.6).
England have only 6 more tests between now and the Ashes next August, so it’s going to take a miracle to sort the batting out before then.
England in a good position going into the final day, 154 ahead with Cook and Root still there to add. Perhaps Cook will get his fairytale after all.
Keaton Jennings has the worst record of any home opener ever (min:10 matches), but with Cook going, are they really going to replace both openers for Sri Lanka? Rory Burns is the man the media are pushing as an opener, but who will open with him?
I actually liked Jennings when he returned to the side, and no batsman has covered themselves with glory in this series* in which the bowlers have dominated, so even though he’s struggled, I’d be happy if he was kept in the side for another series, but we’ll see what they do.
*Kohli averages 65, and has had by some distance the best series of any batsman. Woakes averages 74 after one big innings (after only playing 2 tests), and there’s a scattering of 40s, including Sam Curran.
It’s actually only the 4th day tomorrow, though you could be forgiven for the mistake - I don’t think any of the games have reached the 5th day so far.
That’s putting it mildly - leaving out the players with less than 5 innings, the next after Kohli (nearly 600 runs at 65) are Pujara (278 at 46, almost half of them in one innings) and Buttler (349 at 43). Then comes Curran - and no-one else on either side averages 30.
Cook’s 228 runs at 28 make him comfortably the most successful of the openers - none of the others has made a 50.
I wonder if Root will beat Cook to his century.
Cook tons up, Root still on 81. Scoring coming quicker now, they will presumably declare sometime after tea and see what India can do.
Well played, Chef.
What a way to do it!
Fairytale stuff, but what’s the point of sport if it doesn’t deliver that kind of thing every so often?
BEtween the scoreline and the crowd’s focus on Cook rather than the game as such, it’s going to be an otherwise anticlimactic finish to a good series unless India can rouse themselves. A shame for them to finish 4-1 because they’ve been better than that and England have been worse.
Boy, is Cook showing us what we’re going to miss.
As for the series, it is perhaps unkind to say that England’s deficiencies have been masked by India’s worse ones, but there is some truth in it. Extras probably has a better average than most of the England team, thanks to some wayward bowling and suspect keeping from India. More charitably, one of India’s stars (Ashwin) has clearly been injured for much of the time and England have benefited from several fine individual performances at crucial times when it really mattered (Woakes, Buttler, Curran, Moeen, Cook & Root today). As you say, 4-1 will really flatter them and hopefully doesn’t lead the players/coaches to think they are better than they really are. This Test does seem like a missed opportunity to pop Burns in at number 3 (basically equivalent to opening the way Jennings is at the moment), probably dropping Broad or Anderson, assuming any egos that need it can be smoothed over. Oh well.
Really pleased for Cook, he seems like a thoroughly good guy and if anyone “deserves” to go out like that it’s him.
The only thing to cap it would be for Jimmy to take the last wicket of the match that beats McGrath’s record, a classic late in-swinger to the feet that holds its line and gets nicked to Cook who snaffles it gratefully.
The last action of of the test, the series and his career. If the cricket gods have any sense of poetry, that’ll be how it happens.
Well, it wasn’t far off, but Anderson selfishly took middle stump rather than the edge of the bat.
An excellent series all round (not so much for India fans, perhaps), certainly a great advert for Test cricket - long may it continue.
So…
I was there. Tickets to Days 1-4 at The Oval meant I didn’t get to see the end but I was there for Cook’s last innings, the ton, the ovation, the wicket, the walk off. One of those moments where “I was there” will be enough I think - one to talk about in my dotage at least. Day 4 in particular might be the most memorable, if not quite the best, day of cricket I’ve ever seen live in the ground. The atmosphere as Cook neared his ton was unlike anything I’ve ever been in. Everyone was willing him on and as the bowler ran up for every delivery in his 90s, the crowd went silent. Generally, regardless of the state of play, there will be some background noise, ranging from a murmur, through a burble all the way up to a roar. Not on Monday. You could literally have heard a pin drop. It was like no one wanted to breath in the wrong way, in case it all went wrong. I think I might remember that more than the ovation at the ton, which I can only describe as vaguely Stalinist - no one wanted to be the first to stop clapping and sit back down, like the KGB were going to note your name in some ledger. So on it went, for what seemed like forever at the time.
Have held off talking about this all series. I think we’ve learned almost nothing in this series. All the problems that England had in the recent past are still there, waiting to be corrected and, in some cases, have got worse. Cook was not in the best of form for some time, and this is probably the right moment to go in that respect I think, but we’ve never found anyone to bat with him since Strauss retired and now we’ve got to replace him as well. 3 is currently the black hole where hope goes to die in the England line up. We’re massively reliant on a 36 year old for our front line bowling. Rashid is incredibly expensive, so can’t bowl in tight games/without run support (which we’re not going to find without a strong foundation at the top of the order) and Mo can’t bowl effectively abroad, so our spin attack is probably not in great shape either. Curran has confounded my expectations - I thought he might not have enough to make it (and he still might not) but he’s got guts and seems to think more than some of the other guys we’ve had out there in the recent past. Buttler is a talent, and I guess I have to hold my hand up and say I was wrong about him playing red ball cricket too, but, honestly, you could pick any number of players from 4-8 in the England line up and the results are likely to be the same. The lower middle order won us this series - it’s not that we had better batting than India necessarily; we just had more of it. I’d like us to not be 100-4 every fucking game though.
So still loads to put right then. Burns deserves his crack - don’t think any other English qualified batsman has scored 1000 first class runs in each of the last 5 years - but be prepared for him to look ugly as hell if he starts playing for England; seen plenty of him down The Oval and he scores lots but a classicist he is not. There’s a couple of pace bowlers in the championship that are worth a look in the series coming up I think (Olly Stone, Jamie Overton), simply to start looking at what the succession plan might be, and I’d definitely get Leach and Bess back into the squad to go to Sri Lanka, so we can drop Rashid if he keeps being incredibly expensive. Mo at 3 is a disaster waiting to happen against Starc, Hazelwood etc next summer, as he’s not good with pace. We could really do with someone coming good at 3. No bloody clue who this will be though. Burns is going to get in mainly due to the exhaustion of all other viable options - some of the guys who might have been given debuts have regressed over the last couple of years (Bell-Drummond, Gubbins) and we’re probably about 18 months away from the heartbreaking “Whatever Happened To Haseeb Hameed?” article in the press up here. I’ve watched a lot of county cricket over the last 3-4 years and I can’t come up with a name that I think has any realistic chance of sticking at 3…
The Indian pace attack is the best seam up attack that has been brought up here in some time I think. Collectively, I thought they were excellent, especially when Bumrah came back into the team, and I have, in particular, a lot of time for Mohammad Shami who bowled probably the best 0-fer I’ve ever seen at The Oval in the first innings (I think - can’t remember him taking a wicket until the 2nd innings anyway); God alone knows what they’d have been able to do if Bhuvi Kumar had been fit to provide them with the swing attack to replicate Anderson. They also had the best batsman on show by a bloody mile and I thought Pujara was better than anyone that played in the top 3 for England over the course of the series, even though he also failed a fair amount too (maybe I am a bit harsh on the openers on both sides - it was damn hard out there by the looks of things, given conditions and the quality of the bowling). 4-1 though. How did it happen?
Pundits are talking about them losing the little moments - and that’s probably right - but I thought they were by turns unlucky (getting the worst of the conditions to bat in, twice, at Lord’s and then it being brilliant batting conditions when England batted was particularly unfortunate, losing 5 tosses in a row won’t help either) but also poorly captained (an example being the utter let off Kohli gave England on the 2nd morning at The Oval - 190ish for 7, he let England out by poor field placement allowing Buttler and Broad to rotate the strike too easily for the 9th wicket, and moved away from a short attack to Broad who can no longer play it, got a broken rib for his pleasure and looked like he was going to get out to the next short delivery he got). If rumours are to be believed, Kohli also has a key hand in selection and some of those were…odd? Jadeja should have played for more than he did, Pandya wasn’t much cop, Vihari should have been in the side far earlier too and I’ve no idea why they persisted with the openers that they had, when Shaw, one of the bright young up and comers of world cricket was sat there waiting for a debut. India could have helped themselves far more than they did; it sounds odd to say in a series they lost 4-1 but I really think they let this one slip.
If India are serious about being the best side in world cricket they have to start winning matches away from home. Their seam bowlers will give Australia something to think about in their next overseas trip but they’ll need more runs.
England need to find three batsmen and bowling depth. Despite winning 4-1 here, I don’t think the upper echelon sides will be too wary of them, certainly when England have to travel, and Australia will look at this series and think, we can get them next year.
Great post, as usual - thanks. I remember Boycott having some typically harsh words to say in commentary on both captains, but Kohli in particular, and I think that criticism is fair. Similar problem to England when Cook was captain - the best batsman was also the captain, and wasn’t terribly good at the latter but there were no obvious candidates to replace them. In fact, you could say the same of England right now.
Does this suggest that test-quality bowling will brutally expose flaws in technique, as we have seen so often in the past (and present), e.g. Vince, Jennings, Bairstow?
I too fear for us against Australia even if Anderson and Broad can remain fit and in form, as we simply don’t get enough top order runs to compete. But the current Australia team is hardly full of greats, is it? Aren’t they rather in transition as well?
Great post, Cumbrian, and I envy you for getting to see it live.
Agree with most of what you say, though I think you may be a bit hard on Rashid - he went for 3.5 an over in this series, which is hardly excessive and got 10 wickets in 87 overs, including Kohli twice. But the main point stands - he produces the occasional magic ball but too much ordinary stuff. England suffer from having no-one but Anderson who offers control.
For the rest, I’d say England have if anything gone backwards. Curran and Buttler are plusses, but England already had a hard-hitting wicketkeeper and plenty of seam-bowling all-rounders. Meanwhile Cook is gone, Malan (who looked to have cracked it in Australia) has sunk out of sight, Pope is the latest batting flop and the cupboard is very bare.
Word is that Broad may miss out on at least the Sri Lanka trip because the management wants to take 3 spinners and give some of the young seam bowlers a chance. I’m not sure I’d want to give a pace bowler a debut in Sri Lanka - 30C heat, tropical humidity and a pitch offering the seamers nothing is hardly a fair chance.
Boycott was suggesting that if England want to promote an all-rounder to No.3, Stokes is a better option than Moeen or Bairstow because he’s learned to play straighter. He was also tipping Liam Livingstone as an opener - apparently he did well in Sri Lanka on the last A tour.
As for India, it’s alleged they were underprepared (only one red-ball match before the tests). Kohli and the seam bowlers did everything that could have been asked of them, Ashwin was off form and they took too long to bring in Jadeja but ultimately the rest of the top order gave them too little, too late. Which has been a consistent problem for India outside the subcontinent. One theory is that they tend to pick batsmen on the basis of performances in India - where they’re all-but-unbeatable - rather looking for techniques that will hold up in all conditions.
On Burns: I don’t know what it suggests to be honest. I thought Stoneman, having seen him a lot, had a nice compact style and had worked out the shots that were going to get him out and stopped playing them. Then he took a step up and got exposed. Meanwhile both Graeme and Steve Smith are not exactly elegant batsmen but they score(d) lots of runs. I don’t know whether style is a predictor of success - what I will say is that if Burns gets into a bad trot, he’s going to look really bad when he does, and some of these judgements being what they are, be prepared for people to climb into him primarily because of his unorthodox look.
Australia - I reckon, at least at the moment - will present similar sorts of challenges to India this summer, except with more pace in the bowling unit. For Bumrah, Sharma, Shami, Ashwin/Jadeja read Starc, Cummins, Hazelwood, Lyon and you can see, unless we find someone or the current guys hit rich veins of form, similar problems for our batting order. Elsewhere, yes, it seems that they are a bit in transition too - but they’ve also got their own Kohli who will be back available from his ball tampering ban, so they’re likely to have the best batsmen on show again. It’s only going to take one or two of their other bats to show - or Australia winning tosses that India didn’t, and, transition or not, you can envisage England being right up against it. The reverse may well be true - but given past history, I have more faith in Australia finding batsmen that will succeed than England (this may be my pessimism speaking though).