Mr.Talha Posted June 29, 2022 Posted June 29, 2022 https://www.bbc.com/sport/cricket/61968570 Last September, India were three hours away from starting the fifth Test in Manchester against an England batting line-up that had just subsided to a fifth-day defeat for the second time in three games, with only one player in form, and having won one and lost six of their previous nine Tests, midway through what became their worst run of form for almost three decades. They pulled out of the game, and will now attempt to secure their fourth series victory in England against a fundamentally different opposition. Only five players remain in England's current squad who played in the fourth-Test defeat at The Oval (including Craig Overton, who is unlikely to be selected at Edgbaston on Friday), and they will face a new coach, captain and cricketing philosophy. They will find Joe Root once again touching heights of batting perfection, but little else of familiarity from last year. England have completed one of the most remarkable Test series in their history - three wins (two more than they have managed in their previous 17 Tests), three entries into their top 13 highest successful fourth-innings run chases, and the second fastest run-rate by a team in a Test series of at least three matches (4.54, even with a relatively sedate first Test at Lord's). Root has become the second player, after Australia's Undisputed Greatest Batter Of All Time Don Bradman, to average more than 90 in three separate series in England (five innings minimum), having also done so against India both last summer and in 2014. Meanwhile, Jonny Bairstow compiled the second fastest-scoring individual series by a player who has faced at least 200 balls, his 394 runs coming at a rate of 120 per 100 balls, fractionally behind Shahid Afridi, who thwacked 330 off 272 for Pakistan against India in 2005-06. He contributed the bulk of two of the fastest recorded partnerships of 100 or more (with Stokes at Trent Bridge, and with Root at Headingley), and shared with debutant Jamie Overton the highest partnership for the seventh wicket or lower ever made by a pair coming together with fewer than 100 runs on the board (241, beating the previous record of 190 by Pakistan's Asif Iqbal and Intikhab Alam, who came together at 65-8 at The Oval in 1967). Since his second innings at Trent Bridge, he has scored at a pace that would bring a score of 680-4 from an uninterrupted 90-over day of Test cricket. It will be a vast challenge for India, themselves under new leadership, with minimal preparation and potentially without both Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul, the openers whose discipline and restraint - qualities which do, contrary to some rumours, remain both legal and often valuable in Test cricket - were fundamental to India's successes last summer. How to play Test cricket If England offered India one 'blueprint' for how to play Test cricket, having jettisoned the various anti-blueprints with which they had experimented over the previous 18 months, Daryl Mitchell (only the fourth player to make centuries in three defeats in a single Test series) and Tom Blundell offered another, more traditional one. Their partnerships were the equivalent, with current over rates, of batting well into the final session of the third day of a Test, posting 724-6 off 236 overs (the most runs ever added in a series by a pair of batters in the middle order). Their stands averaged 121 off 39 overs, and provided the perfect object lesson in how to bat against England's attack, an example which their team-mates flatly, repeatedly and often incomprehensibly ignored. Outside of the Mitchell-Blundell resistance, New Zealand lost a wicket every 39 balls, batting with a carelessness and imprecision at odds with the qualities that had taken them to victory in the inaugural World Test Championship. Great players have experienced and emerged from similar career troughs - one of England's greatest, Wally Hammond, failed to reach 50 in 22 Test innings in a 14-Test sequence from 1933 to 1935, having averaged 73 in his 30 previous Tests (from his breakthrough 900-run Ashes triumph in Australia in 1928-29), and before going on to average 76 in his next 25 matches until the outbreak of war. After scoring an unbeaten 194 against Pakistan in March 2005, Sachin Tendulkar's Test career average stood at 58. From April 2004 to November 2007, excluding four games against a weak Bangladesh team, he averaged 32 against top-eight Test teams, with just one hundred in 27 matches. His next 35 Tests brought him 14 centuries and an average of 64. Joe Root had averaged 31 in his last 21 home Tests (with only one century) before India arrived last summer. Since then, in his seven home Tests, he has 960 runs at an average of 96, and was on a seemingly unstoppable course to a sixth century in those seven games until Bairstow's series-concluding barrage on Monday. Kohli's ability to emerge from his long-term statistical slumber in this strange one-off 10-months-delayed series decider could define whether last summer becomes one of the great triumphs of his now-concluded captaincy career.
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