AFTER a successful opening day and just when they should have been steaming merrily along towards a potential match winning total, India yesterday ran straight into a Sargasso Sea, in the form of a more focused and purposeful England attack hell bent on stifling the innings.
The result was desperately dull fare for a capacity crowd but with the pitch likely to become easier it ought to have been sufficient to ensure that England save the match and so win the series. Sometimes it is the nastiest medicine that does the most good.
On Thursday, the England bowlers had taken such a clattering from Sourav Ganguly and Sachin Tendulkar, that there was a real possibility of carnage yesterday. So credit must be given to the bowlers, who not only dismissed Ganguly without addition to his overnight 136, but admirably restricted Tendulkar to just 46 runs prior to lunch and then got rid of him after the interval for 177.
There followed a tortuous half century from Sanjay Manjrekar, whose 54 took more than three and a half hours and it was only another composed innings from Rahul Dravid, who was last out for 84 and farmed the tail so successfully he could qualify for a subsidy, that saw India to 521. But the 234 they added yesterday only 166 of them before tea used up 77 of the day's quota of overs.
It did, however, leave Mike Atherton and Alec Stewart 11 overs to negotiate before stumps, a testing proposition against Srinath and Prasad, consistently the best bowlers on display during the series.
They managed it, reaching 32 still 290 short of their immediate target of 322 required to avoid following on but not without alarm. In the third over, Atherton edged Srinath low to Dravid's left at third slip where the fielder failed to cling on. Atherton eventually made 21.
If the blustery conditions had mitigated some ordinary bowling on Thursday, there was no such excuse yesterday, and the seamers, worked hard by Atherton, and given licence to adopt an attritional approach, responded excellently.
Once more it was Chris Lewis, 3-89, who came out with the best figures. But Alan Mullally stuck to his task and emerged with the early wicket of Ganguly and 2-88 in all from 40 plucky overs, while Mark Ealham plugged away and was rewarded with two wickets including a notable first in Tendulkar.
The first breakthrough of the lay had come from first class attacking bowling from Mullally, who bent his back, hit Ganguly a nasty blow on the right hand, and while it was still throbbing, pitched the next ball up, and found the edge with Nasser Hussain taking a tumbling catch. Tendukar had hit 26 fours in 177 when he tried to pull Ealham, and succeeded only in sending the ball in a gentle parabola from the toe end of his bat to Patel at mid on.
With Tendulkar's dismissal England seized the initiative and four overs later, Azharuddin turned a ball from Lewis off his hip and saw Patel, now perched under the helmet at short leg, take a superb reflex catch. The Indian captain has had a poor summer, but this pitch was right up his street. An hour from him and the force could have been right back with India. With his departure went the last trump card.
