There aren’t too many times when a dropped catch works out well for the fielding team in cricket, but it did for England on the second morning of the second Test against India in Vizag. Ben Stokes, crouching in the slips against off-spinner Moeen Ali, dropped Ravichandran Ashwin 40 minutes into the first session of day two, capping England’s frustrating morning till then.
Ashwin stole a run off the resulting misfield and that got the centurion Virat Kohli on strike. On the very next ball, Kohli nicked one towards Stokes’s low right and this time the all-rounder made no mistake and took a really sharp chance to make up for his earlier gaffe. And he had got the Indian captain, on 167, instead of Ashwin.
Ali went on to take two more wickets – both LBW in the same over – to send Wriddhiman Saha and Ravindra Jadeja back quite early, and all of a sudden England were on top. Hawk-Eye replays showed the ball would have missed Jadeja’s leg-stump, but he did not review after consulting Ashwin. India had already wasted a review with Saha, but then Jadeja’s decision looked much more dodgy.
India had done so well with the Decision Review System in the first Test, which they were using for the first time in a bilateral series after 2011, but their inexperience with using the technology was finally showing. It’s not that England, who are experts relatively, used the reviews efficiently. They wasted one of their own during Adil Rashid’s over, where the ball was clearly missing off-stump.
At 363/7, India were in danger of being dismissed below 400 – and although that is not a bad first-innings total in any way, their inability to reach 450 after being 317/4 overnight could come back to bite them if England showed some mighty resolve in their batting. However, Ashwin found an able lower-order partner in debutant Jayant Yadav, who is no mug with the bat.
Ashwin was brilliant with his footwork: he stepped out to the spinners, went for scoops and drove on both sides wonderfully. Yadav, on the other hand, was solid in his defence and used all the experience he had gained while touring Australia with the India A side earlier this year.
Together, the two edged India past the 400-mark and kept rotating the strike, eventually bringing up their 50 partnership. At lunch on day two, the hosts had reached 415/7 after scoring 98 runs at the loss of three wickets in the morning session.
Brief score:
India 415/7 (Virat Kohli 167, Cheteshwar Pujara 119; Moeen Ali 3/77, James Anderson 3/62) vs England.
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