All’s well that ends in rain

A happy end is a priceless gift. We saved the Test match. Don’t let the English press tell you it was the weather. Mahendra Singh Dhoni saved us. In the final overs of the match, with no hope of making the winning score and every chance that the English bowlers would take India’s last wicket, Dhoni raged against fate by going for Michael Vaughan’s bowling and pulling him viciously to the deep-midwicket fielder many times in a row for a single which he then refused to take.

Moved by his heroics, the gods commanded the clouds to foregather and weep. In case you’re the nervous sort of desi fan and haven’t asked what happened after they went in for bad light for fear of finding out, I can confirm that we saved the match, Dhoni and me. Yes, I had to take a hand. There was a bad moment when Monty Panesar appealed for a leg before decision against Sreesanth and Steve Bucknor, who has form when it comes to pushing us off the edge, got all twitchy. He would have grimaced and nodded and raised his finger but taking advantage of how slowly he gets to the point I whipped out my wand and yelled “Stupefy!” That stopped him. Nobody noticed that he was unconscious for a bit because a) he was standing up and b) he isn’t too animated to start with.

Like I said, a happy end makes a difference to the whole story and all the characters in it. At the end of the first day’s play when England were two hundred and plenty for four, I wanted to sack the pace ‘attack’. When you need Sourav Ganguly to take the first wicket and Anil Kumble to take the second (after giving away more than two hundred runs), three specialist seamers begin to seem extravagant. RP Singh was high on my list of least favoured bowlers. I found his run-up and follow-through deliberate to the point of absurdity: why, I wondered, did he bowl fast if he was worried that some body part was about to fall off? And when Dinesh Karthik put down Andrew Strauss, he was lucky I had forgotten the Cruciatus curse or he’d still be writhing at point.

By the end of the second day it was clear to me that I had been right about our seamers all along: they were the fulcrum of our side, the pivot on which the team’s fortune’s turned. To get England out for under 300 with a fielding side like ours amounted to genius; which is more than you could say for our batsmen. Karthik batted as well as he had caught and Rahul Dravid died defending so you could say he didn’t throw his wicket away but since he hadn’t scored very many it wasn’t much of a consolation.

By the time we crawled to 200 all out, I had demoted MS Dhoni to Jharkhand’s second XI. To be out, nudging a short ball to slip, like someone providing catching practice, made me wonder what Dravid thought he was doing with two wicketkeepers in the same side. Three if you counted the captain himself. They should have left Dhoni at home given that he was a specialist batsman, a subcontinental specialist. His batting technique was so homespun, it looked home-made.

By the time the fourth day was done, I was vindicated in my early faith in RP Singh, especially in the tiger-like litheness of his bowling action. After he had torn the heart out of the English middle order I could see the Wasim Akram in him - the same effortless rhythm and the same capacity to slip in the lethal bouncer. Dravid’s terminal decline continued apace and while Sachin Tendulkar and Ganguly got a few, it was clear to my unsentimental eye that the sun had set on our galacticos. In terms of bad selection, the 2007 tour of England was proving to be the batting equivalent of the bowling disaster of Pakistan tour in 1978 when we dispatched our great, storied spinners for one tour too many, only to have them slaughtered by the Pakistan batsmen, led by Zaheer Abbas and Javed Miandad.

How much a day, especially a rain-curtailed day, can change things! VVS Laxman’s 39 doesn’t sound like much but when you think of how much it must have helped us reach that moment when the light turned and we returned to the pavilion, with a wicket left, you see at once what a doughty knock it was. And you have to make allowances for the man: that short ball from the brutishly tall Chris Tremlett kept decidedly low. Yes, it did hit the top of the stumps but given where it bounced, in a just world and off a true pitch, it would have sailed over them. And even Ganguly, with 30 runs in the first innings and 40 in the second, had done his bit. Tendulkar, too had shown intent: slashing and pulling, looking like the aggressive Tendulkar we once knew and loved. And come to think of it, Dravid wasn’t out at all. Even the English commentators pointed out that he had been hit outside the line.

Yes, it had been a wonderful Test match. Given the advantage of surprise that England had, in fielding a brand-new pace attack about which the Indian batsmen knew little if anything, it was creditable that India survived the ambush. On a normal ground, the teams would have lost much more time and it wouldn’t have come down to this last wicket drama that English sports writers (and, I regret to report, some Indian writers too) have made so much of. The match would have been drawn as a matter of course. I think the Indian management, perhaps Chandu Borde himself, ought to register a discreet complaint that the Indian team hadn’t been briefed by the ECB on their new, fast-draining grounds. Shouldn’t the speed of drainage have been specified under the playing conditions? Still, a draw was a fair result. Going into the second Test, given the Indian team’s experience and its champion middle order, I would have to say as a neutral critic, that India start favourites.