The Saturday of a headquarters Test has its own mythology which both the weather and the cricket lived up toKL Rahul stood in the deep, with champagne corks arced around him like a shower of meteorites. India’s centurion did not look impressed. He had owned this ground on Thursday. But this was Saturday, when the crowd tends to treat the outfield as an extension of its picnic area. Seeing how far one can spray one’s Piper-Heidsieck has become a sport in its own right.It is the posho equivalent of throwing coins from the stands and ought by rights to earn a swift fine or an Asbo. But the Saturday of the Lord’s Test has its own rituals and its own...
The put-upon captain might have faded away in his fifth year in the job but instead he has played some of his greatest inningsIf you wanted, you could still probably pick a few holes. He edged a few through the slips. He got bogged down a little in the 90s, and then again in the 150s. He didn’t hit a single six. Does an innings even still count these days if it isn’t accompanied by a big flashing bar along the bottom of the screen screaming “OH YEAH”? Most unforgivably of all, Joe Root’s unbeaten 180 against India lasted almost nine hours. Good luck fitting that into BBC Two’s teatime schedule. Related: Masterful Joe Root hauls England back into contention...
The opener is awkward and unspectacular but often effective as he demonstrated with a battling 49 against India at Lord’sAs England’s openers walked out to bat at Lord’s on the second afternoon, a ghostly figure took his seat on the balcony to watch them. Half in light, half in shadow, Haseeb Hameed perched in the doorway of the dressing room and patiently waited for a chance that has been almost five years in the making.Hameed is 24 years old, England’s incumbent No 3 batsman, a player of immense promise and potential, and yet ever since his Test debut in India in late 2016 his career has largely been conceived in terms of loss. In a parallel universe, in the world...
The highest part of the ground offers a vantage point that reveals both less and more as England and India battle it out There’s a long view from the top of the Edrich stand, these days. Make the mountainous climb to the new highest point of the Lord’s ground, and you can see out over blocks of flats, past London’s southwestern sprawl, all the way past the river. The green ridge of a wooded hill rises from the horizon like a mirage – that can’t, surely, be Richmond? – and gives you the sense that you’ve discovered your own private periscope above the crowded city.Kumar Sangakkara, MCC’s current president, officially opened the new Compton and Edrich stands on the first...
Both Indian openers showed grit and talent against a home attack that, James Anderson aside, looked largely disorientatedRohit Sharma arrived in Australia a week before Christmas and immediately went into 14 days of hard quarantine. Marooned in his Sydney apartment while his teammates were playing in Melbourne, once he had completed his daily regimen of exercise there was little to be done except to watch television and think. So that was what he did. As his teammates battled hard against the Australian pace attack of Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc, Sharma watched intently, hour upon hour, working out their methods, working out his own.The Sharma who finally emerged from quarantine was a smarter, more circumspect, more thorough batsman...