The legs and chest of Sai Sudharsan

Sai Sudharsan's success as a Test match player is probably not going to come down to him occasionally tickling the ball down the legside.

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Getting caught down the legside is a disgusting, terrible and unlucky way to be dismissed, right? I used to call it getting sodomized down the legside, because it kind of happens behind your back and no one seems all that happy with it. It's a really weird thing.

And if you go back to Headingley, there is obviously no doubt England believed that Sai Sudharsan has an issue with the balls being bowled down the legside. So far, they've convinced me he has one.

In fact, if you look at the ball that he gets an edge to at Headingley, his head is on off stump and the ball is just miles - and I do mean miles - down the legside at that stage. He still gets an edge on it. And of course, it goes through and is caught by Jamie Smith.

It's not quite as egregious here, but he's got another edge and it goes through to the wicketkeeper. And this time, Jamie Smith smothers it on his own chest.

Sai Sudharsan should have been out caught down the legside twice in the one series. That is kind of remarkable considering England thought it was a plan. Also, it’s just not something that happens a lot.

And so this is a weakness, but what kind of a weakness is it? You can't put two leg slips in - well, I suppose you can if you're Ben Stokes - but you're not gonna have them in all that often. It's really hard to cover that area and you're bowling a lot of dribble and wasting the ball trying to do it.

So it's a weakness; occasionally teams might just think it's worth squirting one down there to see what happens. But it's not a normal Test match weakness. Sai Sudharsan's success as a Test match player is probably not going to come down to him occasionally tickling the ball down the legside.

In fact, I've been thinking about the whole legside trap and how far you can push it as a team. But even England bowl there to him only a little bit. So is it kind of like being run out? Occasionally, teams will try it, but it's not really how Sai Sudharsan is going to be dismissed.

What's interesting is that England found this from limited amount of data. It might have even been from people who were involved with him in the nets, because there really isn't a lot of information about Sai Sudharsan’s first-class career available to people. And they've come up with this plan, right?

But because it's not a completely sustainable plan, you wonder how it's going to work long term. But what it does tell us is that we don't know that much about Sai Sudharsan the first-class player right now. You're talking about someone who made his debut in the IPL before he even played red ball cricket.

He's learning how to play at this level. He doesn't even average 40 in the longer format. It's new to him and to the bowlers. So you can understand why England have had success with this weird form of attack.

But there was something else that I saw while watching Sai Sudharsan today.