Image Credit- BCCI
Like a lot of India home Tests in the past ten years,
it ended. With victory clearly in hand, R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja were
slugging it out for the last wicket.
With 23 Test match-ending wickets, Ashwin leads all players in history; he is
only one behind Shane Warne in second place. However, Jadeja prevailed this
time, taking his 13th five-wicket haul as India triumphed by a record 434 runs.
It was a very familiar ending, but India had rarely
reached one quite like this. On the first morning, they were 33 for 3, but they
were able to comeback to post 445. By day two’s end, England’s reply had surged
to 207 for 2 in 35 overs. The most seasoned player in India’s lineup, Ashwin,
had left Rajkot later that evening for personal reasons, leaving them
shorthanded for the rest of England’s innings with just four bowlers.
India had played some of their greatest cricket from
then till the fast conclusion in the last stages of the fourth day, when
England crashed to 122 all out. It didn’t really match the conventional
narrative of a comeback, which is when a team alters its style of play to
counter and defeat a superior opposition, even though it was in some ways a
comeback victory.
Rather, it was a triumph of unwavering faith in Plan
A, even if it didn’t appear to be functioning in any evident way. In the first
Test in Hyderabad, where England pulled off an incredible comeback victory, it
had not appeared to work. Although it had resulted in a victory for India in
Visakhapatnam, it appeared, at least to the onlooker, that the outcome may have
been different if Jasprit Bumrah hadn’t put on an outstanding show of fast
bowling. Other teams would have questioned if it was time to attempt something
different after Plan A got India to where they were at the end of the second
day in Rajkot.
“When you’re playing Test cricket, it’s not played over two days or three
days. We do understand the importance of extending the game for five
days,” India captain Rohit Sharma said at the post-match presentation.
“[England] played well, to be honest, and played some really good shots.
They put us under pressure a little bit there, but look, we’ve got class in our
squad, when it comes to bowling.
“Obviously, the message was to stay calm because when things like that
happen, it’s actually easy to drift away from what you want to do as a team.
But I’m really proud of how we came back the next day, stuck to what we
discussed, and when those things happen, it’s a delight to watch.”