What a turn around. We pick three seamers ( four with Stokes) and our main spinner and part time bowler take 9 wickets! Who would have thought spin would prevail in India. Come on batsmen, we have a chance to make a game of this if we can build a reasonable total in our second innings.
looks like it was 2000. aug 17 - 18. england v west indies at headingley. windies 172 - ramnaresh sarwan 59, craig white 5-57, darren cough 3-59 england 272 - michael vaughan 76, graeme hick 59, curtley ambrose 4-42, counrtney walsh 4-51 windies 61 - darren gough 4-51, andy caddick 5-14 first 2-day test in 50 years. for england, it was their first 2-day win since 1912. https://www.espncricinfo.com/series...-vs-west-indies-4th-test-63891/full-scorecard
We batted like schoolboys. Selection policy is all wrong, what's the sense of getting players embedded, playing one test, then sending them home whilst the incomers have had no practise and go straight in against one of the best home sides in the world. Beaten in less than 2 days should confirm how wrong the thinking behind this play/rest/return policy is.
That pitch gets served up in county cricket, it's a 25 point deduction. After years of being comedy value in tests outside the subcontinent, India have a team capable of winning games on 'proper' pitches, so they don't really need to serve up raging bunsens any more. Still, it's not the first time they've tried to cheapen test cricket.
That's one of the disappointing things for me. The team India are building could be very special. Their comeback in Australia, with basically their second team was fantastic. They have to win this series comfortably to reach the World Test play off Final (whatever it's called), so it was a bigger incentive to make wickets even more conducive to suiting them. I like the idea of Test league, followed by a play off to decide the Test world champions and breathe some life back into test matches. Just hope with more at stake, this preparing home conditions doesnt become even more pronounced. That said, how did our selectors read the conditions quite so badly? Bizzarely, we could have picked five spinners and it wouldn't have made the slightest impact. The planned rotation of players currently seems really flawed, but I guess priorities this year are the Ashes and the World cup, so I'll reserve judgement til the end of the year. It is almost like they want Bairstow to fail though. Send him home to rest for a couple of weeks. Then he flies back, has a nine (?) hour Indian train journey across a Covid ridden country, to then quarantine in one hotel room with no windows. Wonder what the tennis players would make of that?