Around 20 minutes after the start of play England were in crisis. Two more first-innings wickets had fallen leaving them five down, they still trailed by 223 and Ben Stokes, standing at the bowler’s end, was yet to score. Joe Root guided the ball to long leg, the 14th run of his innings and the 11,954th of his Test career, to become the seventh highest-scorer in Test cricket, overtaking the watching Brian Lara. Another run, another step towards history.
This is the one run chase Root claims not to be interested in, but he is making remarkable progress: having started this series in 10th place he had already overtaken Mahela Jayawardene and Shivnarine Chanderpaul. He is averaging 72.75 this summer and is on course to ease past Kumar Sangakkara and, perhaps by the end of the final Test in September, usurp Alastair Cook, the highest Englishman on the list in fifth. Having just lost their most successful wicket-taker after the retirement of Jimmy Anderson, the period this England team spends without one of their all-time No 1s in their ranks could be measured in weeks.
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For the second innings in succession Root played wonderfully to rescue his side from a worrying position. Crucially, he was also lucky. Should England win this game to complete a clean sweep many will take the opportunity to dismiss this West Indies side as woefully inadequate and the series as further evidence of Test cricket’s decline. But the tourists can counter they were competitive at Trent Bridge for all but a single shambolic session. Should they lose this game could put it down to one pivotal moment, an unfavourable umpire’s decision and a refusal to review.
In the second over of the day Jayden Seales arrowed the ball towards Root’s pads. The 33-year-old tried to flick it to midwicket but, unusually, his technique and head position were less than immaculate, and he mistimed the shot. Neither the umpire nor, after some discussion, the fielding side thought the ball would have gone on to hit the wicket, but HawkEye showed it clattering leg stump. Root was on three.
Ollie Pope was out in the following over, Harry Brook in the one after that and at that stage England might have been 54 for six, 228 behind, and careering to disaster. Instead a reprieved Root helped to install some sanity to their batting and by the time he was out they trailed by 51 and Jamie Smith was just getting going.
It had still been an ugly passage of play for this sometimes reckless England team, who have gradually refined their method but still have work to do. Many games contain periods when the most aggressive option is to shut everything down, when the step before grabbing the momentum is to kill it, even if to do so runs against the instinct for entertainment.
Perhaps there was something in the Edgbaston air that carried them away. Three years ago, the local city council adopted a new slogan: “Be bold, be Birmingham.” “The dictionary definition of bold is a person, action or idea showing a willingness to take risks; confident and courageous,” it explains on its website. “Birmingham as a city and its people are exactly those words.”
A different B-word has come to be associated with this England team, but they too are trying to be Birmingham. Sometimes, as they seem to have grudgingly accepted, it can be better to be a little calmer and more considered – still Birmingham-adjacent, sure, but just toned down a bit. Occasionally it is fine to be Solihull.
In the buildup to this Test Ben Stokes spoke about his team’s increasing sobriety, their newfound ability to duck out of a cricketing rush hour and enjoy the occasional stroll in suburbia. But in the frantic opening hour of their first innings here, split across the end of day one and the start of day two, it was very hard to discern. At one point five wickets fell for 25 runs, Ben Duckett and Pope playing on, Brook nicking off, players running towards danger and taking it full in the face.
At Trent Bridge, Root had produced a match-defining partnership with Brook to usher England safely through the most awkward period of the game. Here, he did a similar job in the company of Stokes, gradually lifting the pressure on his team and transferring it on to their opponents, creating the conditions that would eventually allow Smith and Chris Woakes to put the home side fully in control, making the unlikely achievable.
On which subject Sachin Tendulkar, the greatest of them all, is 3,960 runs away. On days like this it feels like just a matter of time.
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