Bearing witness to a memorable Test series packed with events and excitement that you’ll struggle to remember more than a handful.
Holy mackerel Batman, what did we just watch? Bearing witness to a Full-on and full-scale English summer.
Give your mind over to this Anderson-Tendulkar series. Permeate your veins with it. Let it be the dopamine high that comes naturally without the need for activity. Think about what you’ve seen. Break it down. Take your time—no, really, set aside time to go back and sort through every bit of it—to understand how, almost every day, every session, and occasionally every ball, this series pulled you in one direction, then pulled you in another, and then, like a wet tea towel, wrung out every last bit of emotion from you.
Was this one series truly so full of events? Is it possible for one series to include so much? So much that, because to the nature of the human brain, no matter how much you remember, there will always be that much you won’t. In fact, Shubman Gill went after Bradman’s record.
He went as far as he could to emulate Zak Crawley’s masculinity. In fact, Jofra Archer made a comeback to Test cricket and bowled those two deliveries to Rishabh Pant. It felt a touch lacklustre and quite expected, but England did manage to chase down their second-highest total ever. In the same series, England genuinely wanted to be less arrogant, less petty, and less d***heads.
KL Rahul, the epitome of old-school judiciousness, truly turned into the Test batter he had long promised to be. Despite all the important things he did, Mohammed Siraj did make that catch at Edgbaston, which was possibly the series’ best catch. The controversy around handshakes was serious.
One above the Dukes balls was undoubtedly present. Without including Washington Sundar and his completely unannounced gatecrashing of this series, this would, in my opinion, be lacking. He used traditional stonewalling to save one Test, modern freewheeling to win the final, and cunning, wicked ball drift that is appropriately called grift.
A great Test series also takes over our lives for a spell, just like any other binge-worthy series. We become fixated on its storylines and subplots, characters and their arcs, heroes and villains, and plays and ploys. We follow its logic, speak its language, and move at its speed. Even though we can never truly predict what will happen next, we rely on its episodic highs, lows, and lulls as well as its continuity. Furthermore, spoilers are impossible.
Here, we were doubly fortunate to get a 56-minute summary of all the sensations of the 24 days leading up to the series’ finale. The breathless, unrelenting surge and counter-surge of an entire series; the two boundaries off the first two balls, one authoritative, one unintended, cutting the target down by a fifth; the wicket off the seventh multiplying it back by five; a chance missed, another turned into a six, a review upheld, one overturned.
As appropriate as it was that Chris Woakes and his sling were on the pitch at the conclusion, serving as a reminder of how authentic this drama was and how non-fiction it was. Shoaib Bashir got a match-winning wicket with a broken finger, Stokes bowled an eight-over session on the last morning at Old Trafford with a ruptured shoulder muscle of unknown origin, and Pant returned to play with a fractured foot just in this series.
Without a question, a five-Test series takes a toll like few other things, but all four were game-related injuries that could have occurred in a shorter series. It has been particularly demanding. This century, it was only the third time that every Test in a five-match series had advanced to the final day when the teams emerged on Monday. Except for Root, who was captain of England during the 2017–18 Ashes, it has never been done before.
Four of the greatest names in the game—Stokes, Archer, Jasprit Bumrah, and Pant—were lost in the final Test. However, the fact that their absence was hardly noticed and that the series’ best game was still developed without these stars speaks volumes about it.