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England's long, resigned sigh of an innings a depressing inevitability

There are days of Test cricket you remember for ever, the ones players relive in countless conversations, speeches and interviews long after they are gone, so that years later each last little detail of them feels as crisp and clear as if it had only just been earlier that morning.

And then there are the days like the one England just had in Ahmedabad, frustrating, exasperating, bad tempered and best forgotten, the ones you would rather just move right on from before anyone ever mentions them. When, at the end of play, the only real consolation is you get the chance to try all over again tomorrow.

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It wasn’t even that their collapse was so very terrible, not by English standards. They have been bowled out cheaper in the first innings of a Test four times in the last three years, for 58 in Auckland, and 67 at Headingley, and 77 in Bridgetown, and 85 at Lord’s. Compared with those, there was nothing wildly dramatic about what happened here, more just the dismal and depressing inevitability of their being not quite good enough against India’s spin bowlers on another tricky pitch. It was a long, resigned sigh of an innings, like a knackered man sinking into an armchair.

You could feel it coming on almost as soon Virat Kohli brought his spinner Axar Patel on to bowl in the seventh over, and he immediately bamboozled Jonny Bairstow with one that went on, dead straight. It was disconcertingly early for all this, and it exacerbated the gnawing feeling, which had been there ever since the two captains announced their teams, that Kohli knew something about this surface that England didn’t – yet – but which they were about to find out all about. The infuriating thing was that it was surely possible to play well on this pitch, or at least, play better than this.

Zak Crawley had already shown he could do it earlier in the morning, when he hit the ball with such sweet timing that it felt like his game had been precision engineered by a man wearing a jeweller’s loupe in a workshop in Switzerland. There were 10 fours in his 53 runs, the first of them, struck, no joke, with what seemed to be a forward defensive.

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It felt like he had benefited from being socially distanced from that 317-run defeat in Chennai last week. But the English batsmen’s anxiety about how to go about playing spin seems to be contagious, and as he watched Joe Root struggle he seemed to shrink in confidence, started to play back when he might have been forward.

Patel got him, in the end, lbw playing for spin that wasn’t there. Crawley pointed out later on that the batsmen were struggling because half the deliveries turned and the other half did not, and there was no ready way to tell which was which. It was all bewilderingly inconsistent.

Which is what they said about the umpires, too. When the third umpire ruled that a catch Ben Stokes claimed off Shubman Gill in Stuart Broad’s first over had not carried, Root and Broad crowded in on the umpire Anil Chaudhary to argue the point.

It was not the decision Root objected too, he explained, so much as they way the umpire arrived at it. In England’s innings the third umpire, Chettithody Shamshuddin, had run multiple replays of a catch Cheteshwar Pujara took off Jack Leach, before finally deciding it was out. He was a lot quicker to make up his mind this time, and Root didn’t like the contrast.

You could understand Root’s irritation, especially given that Chaudhary thought it was out himself before he referred it to his colleague, that TV images are notoriously little use for making these kinds of rulings because they foreshorten the image, and England already felt sore because they lost out on Ajinkya Rahane’s wicket in the second Test when the TV umpire failed to look at all the available footage. But that does not justify all the carry-on, any more than it did when Kohli did a similar thing to umpire Nitin Menon in the second Test last week.

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Root protested, too, when Shamshuddin decided that Rohit Sharma had survived Ben Foakes’s attempted stumping when his score was 53. Again, it felt like the right decision, but again, it came uncomfortably quickly.

Earlier this week the MCC’s world cricket committee met for the first time in 2021, and made the argument that after the pandemic the International Cricket Council should insist on having neutral TV umpires, and also consider moving them away from the venue to a central location, to allow specialists to do the job remotely. After what has gone on in the last two weeks, it feels like a sensible suggestion.

Shame there is no such ready remedy for England’s batting though, which you guess was what was really bothering them. But, perhaps after the pandemic we might find, too, that on-field tempers cool (and if they don’t the authorities should be quick to make them). After all, the backdrop to all this wasn’t just England’s bad batting in the first innings, but also the fact that all these players are spending weeks locked up in the bio-bubble. They are just as prone to petty irritation as all the rest of us, and, hell, we haven’t just been bowled out for spit after winning the toss on a turning wicket.