The haunting runouts of London

In a series of fine margins, India have given England two massive freebies.

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London, 31st of July. Gus Atkinson delivers a very standard angled-in delivery that zings back in at Shubman Gill. If it was straight up, it would've been a difficult one for Gill to play. Instead, he handles it with ease, getting it mostly off the middle, but not entirely, as the seam movement has moved it into the inside part of his bat.

Not really an edge, but it means that the batter is not in a hundred percent control of exactly where he is hitting it, or maybe more importantly, how hard he's hitting it. But in Gill's mind, the delivery has been handled and then pushed into a gap at cover to steal a run.

But he hasn't factored in the ever-so-slight mistiming of the ball that ends with it going more towards the bowler than a gap. The only issue with that theory is that Gill is actually watching the ball bounce up. He gets to see exactly where it is going and at what speed, yet even with all that extra information, he still takes off.

His first two steps are sprints, but midway through the third, you could see him realize that what he's doing is wrong. It probably didn't need a very athletic bowler to move around and finish Gill off. But Atkinson is there. And while he could have flicked it underarm with his left hand or done a backflip, instead he runs around.

He picks up the ball with his left hand, takes it to his right, and then has an age to look at the stumps and throws them down.

In fact, when the ball leaves his hand, he has so much time that Gill is standing next to Atkinson. His slow turn on a damp wicket means he's nowhere. This is a tough pitch. Any team would have struggled today. But when one of your batters is in an all-time purple patch, and he hits the ball to the bowler and runs, that is about as bad a way as you can lose a wicket on a surface like this.

This might be the moment that India finally lose the series. At the very least, it was a freebie to England on a day India had to win. And not for the first time this series, India had run themselves into trouble.

One of the hardest things to face in cricket is a bowler who doesn't know where it's going. Batters are reading the field, the pitch and the previous plans to get hints on where the delivery is coming. But if a bowler loses his radar, then a lot of that information is pointless.

Josh Tongue could not get his feet right today. He's a big man with clumpy feet, and when they hit the pitch on a damp surface, he's going to struggle more than most. But this was an epic fail. His first over was like watching someone shoot an arrow at a target when drunk, at night, with a blindfold on, after being spun around 22 times.

It was the kind of spell you are happy not to be at short leg for, because there’s an outside chance of being hit by the bowler. Today, Josh Tongue came around the wicket to Ravindra Jadeja and delivered outside leg stump. It went straight to the boundary.

It was far from his worst, but he followed it up with a short, wide ball that was uppercut over the slips. It meant that in the space of two deliveries, his line and length had changed by metres. As if he was bowling at one end to a right-hander who was going to nick to the slips, and on the other to a southpaw he wanted to bounce, but had slipped on a banana peel on the way.

But the third delivery that followed all this up was back of a length, angled in at pace, moving away just enough to take the outside part of the bat and dismiss India’s middle-order rock.

How do you play that? How do you bowl that? How do you cricket that?