Grandstand finish expected on Day 5 of manic 3rd Test with India needing 135 runs to go 2-1 and England needing 6 wickets.
Lords is in for a grandstand finish on Day 5.
In their attempt to take a 2-1 lead in the match, will England grab early wickets and force their way past India? After losing the first match of the series, will India maintain their momentum and score the 135 runs needed to win back-to-back Test matches?
Both teams are “desperate” to win, according to England’s assistant coach Marcus Trescothick, which will only heighten the atmosphere of this captivating Lord’s Test, which has been drama-filled over the weekend.
“Well, if I knew that, I could probably relax a little bit easier coming into tomorrow,” Trescothick said at the post-match media briefing when asked which team had the edge going into day five. “But of course, both teams are desperate to win.
“It’s going to be amazing, isn’t it? Already we’ve seen four good days of cricket and two games, which have been well supported, but that last sort of hour or half-an-hour, the support and the energy around the ground made it amazing really, didn’t it? Everybody was invested into it.
“From an England point of view, obviously brilliant – we love those sorts of situations when the crowd is really up behind the team. Hopefully we can get a bit more of that tomorrow and we can sort of push forward to winning the game. So it will revolve around the first hour of the day tomorrow, how positive India can be, how dominant we can be with the ball, and how many earlier wickets we can get.”
Over the weekend, Lord’s sold out, and for the majority of Sunday, the crowd was glued to their seats. which has a lot of drama at each end. If the morning session began with Mohammed Siraj and Jasprit Bumrah stifling England with probing spells, Brydon Carse and Ben Stokes regained control by taking three late wickets to leave India at 58 for 4.
The remaining Indian hitters will make England nervous. Washington Sundar, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Ravindra Jadeja, and Rishabh Pant are still to enter for KL Rahul, who is undefeated at 33. Trescothick concurred that Rahul and Pant were the two “dangerous” hitters who, if they got their bearings, could cause England problems on Monday.
“KL’s been classical old-school style of Test cricket and he’s left the ball really well. His judgment of the length is good, looked to bat for a long period of time and he’s done it well,” he said. “Obviously [Rahul got] a hundred in the first innings. Hopefully we can get him out early and we can start getting into the rest of the tail as they come along. But he’s been pretty dominant in a few of the games that he’s played and he’s pretty much got a score in most innings that he’s played.”