‘You can always tell a proper lover of cricket’, Michael Kennedy, the great music critic, liked to say. ‘It’s whether they can appreciate a draw.’ A hit, a palpable hit. By concluding a magnificent Test series at two matches each, after India’s victory in the fifth game at the Oval, even England’s disappointed players may nod in agreement. They fell seven runs short, but nobody lost. Everybody who took part in this contest of equals should feel proud.
‘Proper’ cricket-lovers will have no doubt, for this contest was one for the annals. All five matches went into the fifth day, and India eventually prevailed by the tightest winning margin in their history after Mohammed Siraj, their leonine fast bowler, took his fifth wicket, and ninth in the match.
England did jolly well to get within two hits of victory. They went into the game without Ben Stokes, their captain and navigator, and they lost Chris Woakes, one of their four pace bowlers, to a dislocated left shoulder during India’s first innings.
Woakes appeared to a standing ovation on the fall of England’s ninth wicket, with 17 runs needed. When Gus Atkinson slogged Siraj for six, England supporters in a house thronged by Indian fans began to think of an improbable climax. But he had to do it by himself, for Woakes did not trust himself to face a ball. Siraj eventually pierced Atkinson’s defences with a superb yorker, which sent India’s followers howling with joy.
A drawn series, with honour bright on both sides, may confound those brought up on the froth and bubble of instant gratification. That is the way of much modern cricket, too, which the Indians have colonised with their Premier League format – games of 20 overs a side between highly-paid franchises, which resemble the real game as closely as bubblegum pop sounds like the Missa Solemnis.
Full marks then to this Indian team, led by their new captain Shubman Gill, who have shown beyond argument that Test cricket remains the true currency. Gill made 754 runs, 430 of them in the second Test at Birmingham, where India levelled the series after England had won the opening Test at Leeds.
England took the third Test at Lord’s, thanks mainly to a remarkable example of leadership by Stokes, who bowled himself into the ground. He had another go in the fourth Test at Manchester, where a flat pitch confounded him. That and some sloppy catching, not to mention two fine centuries in a lengthy rearguard action by Ravi Jadeja and Washington Sundar.
Everywhere you looked there were outstanding performances. Two of the finest came on the fourth day at the Oval when England, needing 374, were sustained by Joe Root and Harry Brook, who made the kind of centuries we have come to take for granted. It was Root’s third ton in successive matches, and there were 18 other individual scores of more than 100 between the two sides. To quote Larkin, ‘I choke on such nutritious images’.
A drawn series, with honour bright on both sides, may confound those brought up on the froth and bubble of instant gratification
India’s players were also in the wars. Rishabh Pant, their cavalier wicketkeeper, who clobbered centuries in both innings at Leeds, sustained a broken bone in his right foot at Manchester, where he hobbled out to bat as a wounded warrior to the kind of reception Woakes got at the Oval. There was courage in abundance, as well as high skill.
There was also spice. At Lord’s, where Gill twice received an on-field massage that irritated the England players, the Indian captain responded by turning on Zac Crawley, who wasted time shamefully when England came out to bat. ‘Grow some balls’, he told the opening batsman. We’ve come a long way from Wellington and the Corsican bandit.
Throughout the series there was a lot of snarling, and the kind of pouting more commonly displayed by tarts in Old Compton Street. But the players came together when the curtain was finally lowered. They knew they had given everything to the cause, and that cause, as Arnold Bennett wrote of Denry Machin in The Card, is cheering us all up.
A great series of cricket ends with the teams standing on level ground, as they did on the first morning of the first Test, on 20 June. There have been casualties along the way. Poor Woakes will probably never play Test cricket again, and Stokes’s fitness remains a matter for concern ahead of the tour of Australia, which begins in November.
The Tests were shoehorned into seven weeks because August has been cleared for the ghastly whack-it competition called The Hundred, which the England Cricket Board introduced five years ago to provide funds for the coffers. They’ve got the money now, thanks to the Indian franchises who seek global domination, but nobody who watches a game in the next month will remember a single ball.
We shall recall the Test series that has just ended, though. It was a cracker. And two Tests each was just right, as all proper cricket-lovers will confirm.
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