The art of the draw

We don’t have draws with this much cricket being played, we don’t have blocking out for nearly two days, and we don’t really have many day fives at all.

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Jofra Archer has a jumper tied around his waist. Harry Brook is bowling offspin. Ravindra Jadeja will not shake hands. Zak Crawley thinks he can be tricked into a draw. A bouncer from Joe Root. Declaration bowling when there’s no actual possible declaration coming.

These are the kinds of things that can only happen in a draw. A real draw. Not a rain draw, not a lost-time draw, but when both teams have gone all the way to the end. Both sides are exhausted, and no one wins. This is the silly time where handshakes are the most important things you have ever heard of, and you get the Ministry of Funny Walks bowling.

But to get there, India had to put on two incredible partnerships. One began when Chris Woakes was on a hat-trick; the other came when batting was very hard for left-handers, and India had plenty of them. All this without their number five, who was either at the hotel or hiding in the back of the changeroom.

India drew a Test where, for over two sessions, the next man in was Shardul Thakur. And all of this is wilder because we don’t even have Tests like these anymore. We don’t have draws with this much cricket being played, we don’t have blocking out for nearly two days, and we don’t really have many day fives at all.

Today, India gave us all of that, and Harry Brook’s offspin. It was an epic comeback, one that gave us five more days of life in this series.

This year, only 7% of matches have made it to the fifth day. We have four-day Tests already - we just haven’t noticed. This series, though, has been a massive outlier. With the soft Dukes balls, flat English wickets, and competent batting displays all around, we have gone deep every opportunity. Since the pandemic era, day fives haven’t really been all that common.

The combination of Bazball thinking, T20 aggression, reinforced Kookaburras, and teams preparing pitches for points means that games don’t last that long. Most fans don’t even expect a team to try holding on for a draw.

And when you look at it, no one has actually done it all that much. In the history of the World Test Championship, we’ve only seen 12 Tests with more than 2400 balls bowled (around 4.5 days of cricket) end in draws.

The last time a team really blocked out for a draw was Karachi in 2023. That was when Sarfaraz Ahmed stole a draw from New Zealand with one wicket in hand. He was magnificent. (Of course, he played just three more games before never being seen again.)

A closer look at those 12 draws shows Karachi coming up three times, and North Sound twice. Basically, there are only two pitches in the world that actually give us draws without the need for rain or bad light. The rest of the time, no one gets them.

So teams don’t get to day five, and they don’t play out for draws. Indian pitches have been supersized for early wickets, so even compared to other sides, this is a team that was not ready for the long bore.

But this game had something else. During the WTC era, we’ve never seen a drawn pitch average 60 with the bat. That is a lot of runs. And if you talk to a Lancashire County Member, they will say they never want to see it again after all the county games and then this. This pitch is Karachi and North Sound-like. Even when the ball kept low, no one could take wickets here.

That was India’s big advantage - one they tried to shit on royally by losing two wickets in the first over of an innings, when they needed to bat more than 150 of them. They lost 20% of their resources before punters had sat back down in their seats. Being that their number five was also unlikely to bat on day four, they were potentially 0-3.

It’s never actually good sign when a scorecard looks so bad you wonder if it’s a game using the Australian scoring system. But if India had an advantage, it’s that they bat a long way down the order. In a world of ball-strikers, they have a lot of players who play very late.

For a long time, the phrase “KL Rahul is nothing like Virat Kohli” has been used as a stick to beat the middling batter with. But in England, he makes runs - precisely because he’s nothing like his former teammate. Kohli has never seen a ball he doesn’t want to meet. He’s like a greeter at Walmart. KL plays late. His normal place to strike the ball is approaching posthumous. He hits the ball under his eyes, which helps against the moving ball in England.

It’s also built for drawing innings on slowish pitches with uneven bounce. If India could have gotten him on strike for the first over, they might have actually been able to keep the rest of their top order around.

In the UK so far, he’s looked every bit the player he was once hyped to be. The only way he could be dismissed was from Ben Stokes rolling one along the ground from a short length.

His partner Shubman Gill was also taken by a surprise ball. Jofra Archer was trying to bring the ball back in and somehow made it go the other way. So it made Gill look like he was fending at the wrong line. But he was really just beaten by a weird ball.

Before that, he batted for basically an entire day - only stopping routinely to shake his fingers. (Does wobbling your hand around violently help with crushed digits? Only Shubman Gill will know.)

But again, he looked largely on rails, except for every few hours when he tried to slash a ball in the air on the offside, only for England to drop him. Both of these guys had amazing control through their partnership. When they made a mistake, it really had to be taken, because they weren’t going to give many.

And Jadeja gave one as well. His shot - a soft attempt at a first-ball uppercut - was really the only major mistake he made all day. And Root dropped it with his right, left, and then right hand again. It is only one chance, but three drops.

Then the allrounder went back to god mode. Well, his version of it. He’s trying to knock you out with a series of the softest-handed blows ever seen. There are times when it sounds like he’s using day-old damp lettuce instead of his bat.

And now in two straight knocks, he has almost stolen a match and did, in fact, pinch a draw. He feels like a perfect player for this situation, but usually isn’t. He’s not really been a good bat for India into the closing period of matches. Perhaps being crease-bound causes an issue, or batting against the footmarks and left-arm finger spinners late on Indian tracks.

But the thing he doesn’t do, he has done like a golden god this series. And it’s not as if he’s done it the same way twice. At Lord’s, he went too slow. Here, he batted quite quick. He just goes at his own pace, no matter what.

He’s had a career where only in the fourth innings does he average less with the bat than the ball, and then suddenly he’s decided to be Younis Khan at the end of these matches.

We need to talk about England’s left-arm finger spinner too, because he played a role in this. The Hampshire tweaker - who last bowled in a Test before the Nintendo Switch was invented - really struggled. He had little patches where the ball did things for him, but in large parts, he couldn’t dump the ball in the footmarks - which was 80% of his job.

Then on top of that, he argued with his fearless leader, Ben Stokes. The captain wanted him to try around the wicket more, or to just vary his angle. But Dawson - a player very set in his ways - releases the ball from where he wants, and that’s how it goes. So there were several uncomfortable moments out there.

This week has not been a good advert for Dawson’s talent. He dropped a catch that probably opened the door for the draw. Then Rehan Ahmed and Tom Hartley (neither of whom have done much this year) went and took a million wickets. Truthfully, Dawson was not picked to bowl out India on day five when they are blocking. He doesn’t really have that gear. He’s not a bad fourth-innings spinner, but he’s not going to rock your socks off.

He wasn’t alone. Outside of Ben Stokes’ bowling, England’s attack looked unable to be able to do anything on this pitch. Brydon Carse was forgotten about. Chris Woakes eventually just became an offspinner. And Jofra Archer found a weird time to become better against right-handers than left.

Because when Gill was out, England should have been massively on top. The new ball was there, and Archer had two lefties to aim at. Dawson had been getting some spin and bounce. In fact, Washington hadn’t been playing him that well. It felt like there would be a wicket.

But one massive thing went into India’s favour at this point. The real issue on this wicket was facing seam from the Anderson End, especially bowling over the wicket. If you hit the eight-metre mark, you could hit Gill in the helmet, or KL in the knee roll. But that line didn’t work to the lefties, as they couldn’t get an LBW from it. And when you switched to bowling around, if the ball kept low, it was safely outside off stump.

It wasn’t that the pitch was completely flat, because that would be an odd way of looking at it. It was hard to be dismissed, and at one end, even harder to take down a lefty. Remember, India had a fucken truckload of them. They were like southpaw doomsday preppers, and it worked.

Washington Sundar deserves a lot of credit for this. KL Rahul was seemingly built for England. Shubman Gill is batting on rails. And Ravindra Jadeja is finding a level of beast mode like never before. Washington doesn’t even know what spot Gautam Gambhir’s shuffle batting order is going to use him. In the same match, he’s been behind Shardul Thakur and ahead of Jadeja. The man has batting vertigo.

On top of all that, he hasn’t played much first-class cricket. He barely plays in the IPL, and is not good at batting late in matches. Yet, he did not give a chance. Sure, at times he played the short ball like the world’s slowest-moving snake was rearing up at him, and he did have some concerns with the footmarks, but this was some knock from your number eight or nine. Or five. Or whatever the hell Washington Sundar is.

But the weirdest thing about all of this is how calm India looked outside of a couple of overs. Teams are just not used to blocking out draws. It is supposed to be impossible for the T20 generation. In the World Test Championship era, teams don’t even get close.

Even in the years before that, the pattern was set: teams don’t know how to block the ball with the game on the line.

There just aren’t many overs of fifth-day bowling that people face. This was a flat wicket, but it was unmistakably a fifth-day one with footmarks and weird bounce. For four sessions, you had the fear of one wicket opening the entire thing up. Two lots of new balls to go up against. Ben Stokes bowling until he was nothing more than transplanted red hair and a grimace.

In the end, that was all England were left with. It was them who wanted to shake hands early. There was no point to go on. India had completely choked them. With an extra day of cricket, the tourists would actually have been favourites - such was the ferocity of their rearguard.

In an era of no draws, India blocked the shit out of England so much, they didn’t lose, and got the moral win. England was left to sulk and moan amongst themselves. Bazball was given one hell of a beating. But most of all, India won the moment, after having lost so many in this series. They were not batting to win, but just to stay alive. Now, thanks to that, they and this series continue to live.