India retreat into their bunker
While we wait for session two to start, Shiva Jayaraman has done some digging through the stats.
If the scoreline of 56/4 leaves any doubt about how well the England bowlers, led by the redoubtable James Anderson, have bowled then look at the number of scoring shots India played in the first session of the Test. Their batters managed just 22 scoring shots in the first session, scoring 41 runs from them (the legbyes and no-balls conceded by England have padded the score up a bit). In the last-ten years in Test cricket, only six other sessions, where at least 25 overs were bowled in the first session of the first day of a Test (340 such sessions), have produced fewer scoring shots. In terms of the percentage of deliveries that were scored off by batters in this session (22 out of 155, 14.2%), it ranks a poor 13th from the bottom.
Robinson nicks Rahane off
1pm
If it wasn’t already clear that this was England’s morning, Robinson underlines the point by getting Ajinkya Rahane with a length ball that was angled in, left the pitch, and took a feather edge through to Buttler, who took his fourth catch of the morning. Not a lot seemed to be happening since Anderson left the attack. Rahane seemed to be playing himself in. Rohit was batting like a monk. These two batters seemed intent on pulling India out of their hole.
India go to lunch at 56 for 4. Will Anderson come in and blast out the lower middle order? Will Bumrah and Shami slap-bang their way to a 200-run partnership this time? We’ll be back after the break.
How does Jimmy do it?
A conversation with our correspondent George Dobell
Fernando: So George, you’ve followed Anderson around the world for years. You’ve watched him at close quarters. You’ve interviewed him. You’ve smelt his pheromones. You can level with us. He’s made some sort of deal with the devil to be this good at 39, right? What was it? Did it involve a blood sacrifice?
Dobell: That’s as good an explanation as any I’ve heard. Yes, he’s sacrificed the careers of a generation of England’s top-order batters for an extra few years at the top.
Fernando: That would explain the screams from a certain Burnley basement. And maybe why Gary Ballance hasn’t been seen for a while.
Dobell: But to give a fuller answer, he’s clearly been fortunate with his genetics. He is light. He is strong. Some of that is fortune, no doubt. But he is hungry, too. Relentlessly hungry. And that means he keeps learning. We saw, in the last game, England allowed the emotions of the moment to get the better of them. But here he was cold and clinical in the way he utilised the conditions. We saw the out-swinger he learned at Lancashire all those years ago; we saw the inswinger that took him years to master; and we saw the wobble seam, which is a new toy and renders batting against him a nightmare. You can’t leave him with any certainty, but get drawn into a stroke and you risk those edges. It’s masterful stuff. A delight to witness.
Fernando: I saw someone tweet recently, that during England’s Euro 2020 semi-final, when the whole nation would have been around a TV, Anderson was seen out at a centre nets bowling.
Dobell: HA! Well, that sounds typical. You know, you learn most about him from the moments when he’s struggled. When he insisted – insisted – he go on that tour of India in 2016(ish). He was nowhere near fully fit. And a player with any interest in protecting their personal stats might have thought of skipping that tour and waiting for the green fields of England before making a return. Such is Anderson’s love of the battle and such is his belief, that he kept posting videos of himself bowling in the nets on social media until the England management had to accept he was fit. So they called him up and he endured a pretty rubbish tour. The attitude, though, is telling.
Fernando: Beyond the physical toll, how does he possibly maintain that kind of mental pressure and intensity after 15 years of it?
Dobell: I think he loves it. And maybe being dropped from the white-ball teams has given him the time to decompress in between games. So he’s been able to refresh and regain fitness and go again. But most of all, I think he just knows he’ll never have a better job. And he’s right.
Aging like the finest cheddar
11:45
The cliche about 39-year-old Anderson is that he’s getting better just at the age when most seamers decline (some pretty rapidly). What’s fascinating is figure out when the improvements have come. Anderson actually had a pretty modest record (awful by his standards) at Headingley, which is arguably the premier swing-bowling venue in England.
Since 2016, though, the man averages a quite ridiculous 12.08 at the venue – a streak that now accounts for 38 wickets. It’s hard to even think of a spinner who had a late-career boom in an already booming career the way Anderson has.
Here’s a tweet that drives home this nonsense.
His spell is finally over, btw. Eight overs. Five maidens. Six runs. Three wickets. Will India come out of their bunker now?
Put this spell on Only Fans fast before the ban kicks in
Another glorious set-up, another superb away-swinger, another shot that an India batter didn’t have to play but was suckered into, and Kohli is gone. This spell has been almost gratuitous in its swing-bowling mastery. The ball to Kohli was just on a sixth-stump line, and angled in, and moving away off the seam. Kohli drove, edged, and gave Buttler another catch.
India have lost three. I need a lie down.
It’s Kohli v Anderson time
Jimmy gets another one. He tormented Pujara with inswingers the previous over, hitting the pads repeatedly, and now he’s slipped in the away-swinger, perfectly pitched, Pujara following it with his hands to give Jos Buttler another regulation edge.
In comes captain Kohli, who is short of runs on this tour. He’s had scores of 44 and 13 (in the WTC final v NZ), a duck at Trent Bridge, then 42 and 20 at Lord’s.
In, in, holds its line… and out
It’s the maestro at work. There are bits of grey dusting the temples, but this is a strategy that has worked for Anderson for a decade and a half, and it nabs him an early wicket here as well, to huuuuge cheers from the Headingley crowd. He bowled three slightly short of a length balls that shaped into KL Rahul, then slipped one fuller, that moved just a touch away and took Rahul’s edge, as the batter attempted to drive.
No huge celebrations from Anderson. Just another new ball morning.
Do England have an edge at Headingley?
11 am
Because this is a venue where it swings, and because Ben Stokes played an innings that has been seared indelibly into cricket’s consciousness, it’s tempting to think of Headingey as a ground on which the hosts have an edge. That’s not really true, though. England have lost three Tests to the four they’ve won there since 2010.
Anyway, the teams are out there. Rohit is facing up to Anderson.
India unchanged. Overton and Malan come in for England
England: 1 Rory Burns, 2 Haseeb Hameed, 3 Dawid Malan, 4 Joe Root (capt), 5 Jonny Bairstow, 6 Jos Buttler (wk), 7 Moeen Ali, 8 Sam Curran, 9 Ollie Robinson, 10 Craig Overton, 11 James Anderson
Bumrah on the Lord’s brouhaha
10:35AM
India have won the toss and chose to bat first (more on that soon), but while those details come through, Bumrah has spoken to Sky about the exchanges at Headingley. Here’s what he had to say.
I really don’t want to go into the details, but when we play sport it is never really intentional that we want to really hurt the batsman or trying to aim to hit the batsman. That was our tactic to get the batsman our or get the lower order out because when we usually go to Australia or South Africa this is what happens.
But as soon as the day (Day 3) got over we were going back some of the words were exchanged. And we were really not happy. The exchanges were really not pleasant. I did not hear at that time because I was really tired after a long day, so couldn’t really hear what was going on, but all my teammates heard. Usually I’m a person who doesn’t go looking for a fight. But when I heard what was said I got riled up.
Then I said if something has come up I wouldn’t really back down and stay down. If something comes up I will give 10 times back. So everybody was really charged up and was really looking for a fight, if now something happens we won’t back down and we’ll go really hard. But not to lose shape because we are here to do a job. We don’t really want to talk and not make an impact.
So we were really using that fire to our advantage and then wanted make a result out of it. That eventually happened. We were really motivated and determined, everybody was together, we were really in everybody else’s faces, really going hard. I think that really worked in our favour. If at all anything (like that) comes in the future that will obviously be used in the same manner. And that fire will be used in the same direction.
How much fire will we get at Headingley?
10:25AM
Waddup? Welcome to the Live Report for Test #3 folks. One of the big questions leading in to the Test is whether England can bounce back after being decked so dramatically on day five at Lords. They went into that final day thinking they had a good chance of winning the Test. Then Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammad Shami – who were on the end of some hostile bowling early in the day – put on a rapid partnership to knock the wind out of England’s chest. Then they bowled the hosts out.
The last three days of that Test saw words being exchanged between various England and India players. At the end of day three, James Anderson was involved in tense discussions with Bumrah in particular, as they went off the ground. Over the last few days, Anderson has conceded that perhaps the rancour from day three had influenced some poor decision-making from England on day five – when they tried to unsettle Bumrah with bouncers, rather than get him out.
“When Joe [Root] touched on getting a few things wrong I think potentially the minute Bumrah came in he brought Mark Wood on and took me off. I think that’s the sort of thing he was talking about as in letting the emotion get the better of us.
“That was the sort of, ‘right, it’s time for him have a taste of his own medicine’ type of thing rather than trying to get him out. You could keep me on and just me trying to just get him out normally and see if he plays any big shots whereas he went with Mark Wood straightaway.
“They are a passionate side, they use emotion differently to how we use it. They channel it well. We saw it on the last day. So that’s something we’ve got to think about going into the last three games.”
Is there more tension in store for us at Headingley? What’s a Big Three series these days without big-ego histrionics?
We’ll have the toss for you shortly, anyway.
Andrew Fidel Fernando is ESPNcricinfo’s Sri Lanka correspondent. @afidelf