India bid to bury Bazball 4-1 in R Ashwin’s 100th Test match

The series stitched up in Ranchi for an unassailable lead, India brace for one final bout with Ben Stokes’ bruised England team which has lost three successive Test matches since starting this thoroughly engaging contest with a victory in Hyderabad.

The fifth and final Test starting in scenic Dharamsala on March 7 is India’s last until September when Bangladesh arrive in the country for two matches. India are at first place on the World Test Championship points table, while England languish at eighth, and Rohit Sharma’s team will hope to add 12 more points to their tally in hopes of staying in contention for the final in 2025.

This match will be memorable for two cricketers: Ravichandran Ashwin and Jonny Bairstow, for both will play their 100th Tests. Ashwin, statistically India’s greatest match-winner at home with 507 wickets from 99 Tests, has endured plenty since his debut in 2011 and hopes to surpass Anil Kumble’s mark of 619 wickets. At 37, the offspinner is racing time to get the 113 wickets required to become India’s all-time leading bowler in Tests, but then again this is a bowler for whom the word ‘never’ does not exist.

Bairstow, during a wretched time with the bat, has been backed in his 100th Test by the England team management. The batsman would do well to repay the faith with a substantial score.

While the home team has welcomed back its spearhead and vice-captain Jasprit Bumrah after a one-match break, India will still be without KL Rahul who remains sidelined with injury. Bumrah’s return means one of two things: either one of the pacers, Mohammed Siraj and Akash Deep, sits out the fifth Test or, if the management feels that Dharamsala’s bouncy surface merits three pacers, one of the three spinners gets benched.

Dharamsala has hosted only one Test, back in 2017 when India and Australia squared off in the decider of a superbly contested four-match series. On that occasion, in his first Test, the left-arm wristspinner Kuldeep Yadav claimed four wickets on day one to peg back Australia. Cold and damp conditions in Dharamsala might just see India opt for three pacers, which puts Kuldeep’s position in doubt despite having not lost one of his seven Tests at home.

Regarding the batting, it remains to be seen if Rajat Patidar, who in his debut Test series has managed a paltry 63 runs from six innings, is dropped. While Washington Sundar was released from the squad to play in the Ranji Trophy semi-finals, Patidar was not, which indicates how the team management is viewing the Madhya Pradesh mainstay despite a torrid time at Test level. If Patidar does get the chop, in his place the uncapped Karnataka batsman Devdutt Padikkal would then make his Test debut.

While in the immediate aftermath of India’s five-wicket win in Ranchi last month there have been some who feel criticism of England’s series defeat is unfair and does not wholly encapsulate the manner in which the previous four Test matches have been played, the truth is that Bazball – that much maligned term associated from outside the England dressing room with Stokes and head coach Brendon McCullum’s high-risk approach – has been punctured. Of course, playing Test cricket in India is arguably the toughest of all, but the collective failure of England’s batting unit against the irrepressible Bumrah – really the difference between the two teams – and four different spinners has let Bazball down.

Bringing a green spin attack for five Test matches was a calculated risk on the England selectors’ part, and this is the one aspect of this tour that Bazball can truly take heart from. With England’s lead spinner Jack Leach not playing since the Hyderabad win on account of an injury, the uncapped pair of Tom Hartley and Shoaib Bashir – with some help from legspinner Rehan Ahmed – consistently gave India some headaches.

Hartley, the left-arm spinner with 24 first-class games before this tour, took seven wickets in one innings on Test debut to bowl England to victory. During the fourth Test in Ranchi, Hartley combined with Bashir, 20, to share 12 wickets. The offspinner Bashir, who made his debut in the second match, now has more Test wickets (12) than he had first-class wickets (10) before he departed from England.

One final Test match, then, to see what Bashir and Hartley have. Ollie Robinson’s struggles with fitness and form in Ranchi mean he will certainly sit out this one,

What promised to be a wholly entertaining and engrossing five-Test series has lived up to its billing, even if Stokes believes that the scorecards don’t do justice to how competitive he feels England have been. Let’s have an encore, before cricket shifts into T20 mode with the IPL followed by the World Cup.