‘It looks a bit dry but we’ve played in these conditions a fair bit now,” deadpanned Rohit Sharma after he lost the toss. “We understand what we’ve got to do. We’ve got the skills, we’ve got the guys who can do the job for us. We’ve played in these conditions before so we know exactly what to expect and what we need to do.”
He was not kidding. Virat Kohli’s absence will possibly be felt in time but with England choosing to bat in Hyderabad India took to the field with exactly the guys who could do the job for them. Their three spinners included, of all those who have taken at least 10 Test wickets in the past two years, the players with the best and second-best bowling averages and numbers two, three and four when ranked on economy. Srikar Bharat was surely the right choice as wicketkeeper on a pitch that guaranteed a rigorous test of technique and he produced an impeccable performance to prove it. India also had two of the top 20 seamers ranked by wickets taken over the last two years, one of them, the magnificent Jasprit Bumrah, having played only five times in that period.
There are five Englishmen on that list but the only one involved in this match, Ben Stokes, has no intention of bowling. England’s four spinners included, of those who have taken at least 10 Test wickets in the past two years – 27 of them in all – the players with the fourth- and eighth-worst bowling averages, and two more with one Test appearance between them. The sense was that they did not know exactly what to expect or what they needed to do, and that they may or may not have had the guys who could do the job for them. It was a gambler’s selection, and if Stokes started the day by winning the toss of a coin, his roll of the dice seems to have been less successful.
Tom Hartley made his debut, and it says something about the 24-year-old’s current standing that if you type his name into Google – at least in the UK – the top result is a luxury car dealership in Derbyshire. Perhaps there is more to that link than the name: even on a pitch that can hardly be described as a road he certainly got people driving with great comfort. There was a point, as Hartley was being dismantled by India’s young opener Yashasvi Jaiswal, when the even more callow Shoaib Bashir, controversially restricted to watching the start of the series on television from England, must have been tempted to head straight back to the Indian high commission and beg them to rescind his visa.
Hartley’s first involvement was entirely positive, an innings of 23 off 24 deliveries as he helped Stokes drag England’s score from a concerning 155 for seven to the relative comfort of 246. He got off the mark by hitting Ravichandran Ashwin for four, gave Ravindra Jadeja similar treatment, and cleared the rope with a top-edged slog-sweep, again off Ashwin, before Jadeja bowled him with a snorter. But there was little sign of this composure once he had a ball in his hand.
No-balls in this match are marked by the sounding of a loud and shrill alarm; Hartley set off a couple but might not have noticed, given that a similar noise must have been ringing inside his head from the moment his first delivery in Test cricket was dumped over midwicket and into the stands. These were the clanging chimes of doom and India’s batters did know it was Christmas. Jaiswal slog-swept for another six only four balls later; there were two boundaries in Hartley’s next over, two more in the one after that.
Though there were some good deliveries – England burned two reviews attempting to cheer him up, one of which at least allowed him to admire on the big screen several replays of one that spun nicely past Sharma’s bat – he ended the day having conceded 63 off nine overs, without reward. Rehan Ahmed, who bowled three overs late in the day, got similar treatment and conceded 22.
Hartley is interviewed, looking ahead to this series, in the latest issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly. “I’ve only been to India once but the pitches just allow you to fire it in, you don’t even have to think about flight or guile or anything like that,” he said. These are dangerous words and he will already be regretting them, particularly as his first day in Test cricket surely ended with him having caused more readers to squirm than balls to turn.
