As recently as 1878, a crowd of about 15,000 people paid to watch 18 men spend six days walking in endless circles around the Royal Agricultural Hall, in a 500-mile race for the inaugural Astley Belt for endurance pedestrianism. The competitors were made to eat, sleep and go to the toilet in little tents set up by the side of the track.
According to the reports, by the fourth day there were three “forlorn, destitute, ragged” men left in contention. “Their boots were hanging to their feet by shreds.” Everyone else had been finished off by injuries, irritation and exhaustion.
Thirteen days into this series, and three into this Test, we are starting to get a pretty good idea what it must have felt like. This is hard cricket, in hot weather, on helpless pitches, being played at walking pace by two teams of exhausted men. There were five separate interruptions during the first hour of play on Saturday, it got so bad that the umpire Sharfuddoula Saikat even tried to do something about it and ordered one of the India squad off the field when he tried to run something on for Rishabh Pant five minutes before the midday drinks break. Whoever it was, they ignored him the minute he turned his back.
Eleven minutes of play just evaporated from the game in that session, while the umpires fiddled with the ball or Pant got more treatment on the hand injury he suffered while keeping wicket in the first innings.
It got worse as the day wore on. By the end, when England had eight minutes left to bat, Zak Crawley was essentially refusing to take guard against Jasprit Bumrah in an attempt to drag the penultimate over on so long that there would not be time for another after it. Crawley pulled away twice to deal with imaginary distractions just as Bumrah was about to run in.
When Crawley was hit on the glove he reeled away like he had been shot and called on a physio to treat his finger. Then everything boiled over and the India fielders surrounded him and he ended up having a stand-up row with Shubman Gill, who was busy wagging his finger at him.
This is a heatwave Test. Everyone is on edge. England did not play a five-day Test last summer and they’ve now had two of them, back-to-back, and are three-fifths of the way into what feels bound to be a third, against a team who play hard, bowl fast and sell their wickets dear. The atmosphere is intense and the rhythm’s unfamiliar after three years of happy-go-lucky cricket, all smiles, scoops, sixes and tumbling wickets.
On Saturday, every wicket England took felt like a false peak: once achieved, they found themselves staring at the next one beyond it. When they finally prised out KL Rahul, 13 overs before the new ball, they found themselves plodding on uphill against Nitish Kumar Reddy, who batted like he had just had a ransom note warning him of the consequences of getting out cheaply.
When Reddy was done, there was still another long hour of Washington Sundar, who was playing the same way, ahead of them. It’s blood and sweat cricket, all aching bodies, bad tempers and broken limbs.
This isn’t BazBall. It’s GazBall. India’s head coach, Gautam Gambhir, is loving every bit of it. He is having much more of an influence on what is going on in the middle than his opposite number, Brendon McCullum. Both men want their teams to play the kind of cricket they enjoyed themselves. Gambhir is winning. He is a man who recently described it as a “tough sport for tough people”, and who once spent seven hours scoring 137 to save a game against New Zealand. He made headlines again before this game by telling the players that the tour “is not a holiday”.
You suspect that whatever else his team get up to in the gap between this match and the one after it, it is probably not the sort of jaunt around the local vineyards and golf courses McCullum laid on for England when they were in New Zealand last winter.
Gambhir is a man who was banned for elbowing Shane Watson in the chest while coming through for a second run during a double hundred against Australia and said afterwards he wasn’t “on the field to make friends”, the man who had to be dragged away from a staring contest with Kamran Akmal, who squared up to Shahid Afridi after barrelling into him in the middle of the pitch during an ODI in 2007, and who had to be separated from Virat Kohli after giving him a send-off in an IPL game.
It’s maybe no surprise that he is moulding this young team in his image. It’s more remarkable that he is beginning to have an influence on England, too.
