Harry Brook had thrown his hand away after a blistering 111, offering India just the slimmest of lifelines. Akash Deep, India’s least effective and impressive pacer of the game, had provided the breakthrough; it was now up to his other two comrades to step up.
Twice in the preceding three years, including in Leeds this June, India had allowed England to chase down totals in excess of 370 with consummate ease. In Birmingham in 2022, Joe Root and Jonny Bairstow smashed centuries to muscle their side to a commanding seven-wicket win in the final match of a series that ended more than 12 months after it began. At Headingley in the first Test of the latest showdown, England sauntered untroubled to 371 for the loss of five wickets, Root again unconquered as he completed a demolition job started by Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett.
These two constituted England’s two highest successful chases in Test history. Now, at The Oval, it appeared as if those two chases would bookend an assault on 374, the target Shubman Gill’s side had set for the hosts to complete a 3-1 series victory.
India had done the early running through Mohammed Siraj, who plucked out Crawley’s off-stump off the final ball of the third day and then pinged stand-in skipper Ollie Pope in front a little over 75 minutes into the fourth morning. Between these two strikes came a crucial blow, delivered by a towering 29-year-old who has been around the first-class circuit for a long time but was only playing his sixth Test.
In his second coming as a Test batter, in the Ben Stokes-Brendon McCullum management era, Duckett has emerged as an enterprising, fearless, uninhibited stroke-maker, the aggressor who takes on bowling attacks with surprising consistency, given the high risk associated with his batting. The little left-hander had a torrid time in his first run back in 2016 but reintegrated into the Test set-up in 2022, he has been a fabulous tone-setter for the Bazballing Englishmen.
Prasidh Krishna celebrates with Abhimanyu Easwaran after taking the wicket of Ben Duckett.
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PTI
At Headingley, Duckett had smashed 149 while dominating an opening stand of 188 with Crawley; at The Oval, he had eased to 54 and looked set for another big, defining hand when Prasidh Krishna decided to gatecrash his party. With a full ball that moved late, Prasidh defeated the booming Duckett cover-drive and found the outside edge expertly held at second slip by K.L. Rahul. It was a huge moment in the game, magnified an hour later by Siraj’s dismissal of Pope. With England 106 for three, India felt this was its time.
It eventually was, of course, but Gill’s boys took the scenic route to the finish line when a more mundane but less arduous path beckoned. Prasidh, the designated short-ball enforcer because he can fuse bounce with pace, extracted a false shot from Brook that flew to long-leg; Siraj held the catch but stepped on the rope in what for long threatened to be the turning point. Brook should have been dismissed for 19, England should have slumped further to 137 for four. What followed was carnage, with Brook laying into India with gusto and Root playing his customary unhurried hand, allowing the more boisterous younger man to do the running while he provided the calm and the assurance.
With every scything Brook stroke, the fight seemed to ooze out of the visitors. Their body language was as flat as the bowling and they merely went through the motions when, after a 195-run alliance with Root, Brook charged Akash and put up a catch to mid-off. Now 301 for four, England needed just 73 with six wickets (including an injured Chris Woakes who had dislocated his left shoulder on the opening day) in hand; India had to somehow prise out those six wickets if it was to come back from a series in which Gill’s men more than held their own without anything to show for their perseverance.
Operating from one end, as if on autopilot as he went through one over after another without losing focus, accuracy, control or intensity, was Siraj, relishing the responsibility of being the lead bowler in Jasprit Bumrah’s absence. But he couldn’t do it all on his own. He needed support of the kind Akash had provided in Birmingham, though it was clear that this time around, that had to come from elsewhere, given how sub-par the Bengal pacer’s display was. Elsewhere meant Prasidh, who had had a mixed series — plenty of wickets, sure, but also plenty of runs conceded in quick time.
India didn’t have runs to play with in this instance. Prasidh knew this, England knew this, the thousands at the ground knew this, the millions watching on television knew this. But knowing is one thing, doing is quite another, right?
Heroic and extended burst
And therefore, in a heroic and extended burst split by rain and stumps on the fourth day, Prasidh turned in indisputably the most influential spell of his fledgling Test career. In the end, Siraj rightly walked away with most of the accolades for his tireless, unflagging commitment to the cause, but it needed the Hyderabadi’s incandescence to shade Prasidh’s endeavours. In a last spell of 8-1-19-3, the 29-year-old Prasidh was consistently threatening, mixing craft with intelligence to make the most of favourable overhead conditions, a Duke’s ball that did the faster bowlers’ bidding and an unusually tense and nervy England batting that bore no resemblance to the juggernaut it had been with Brook and Root were running amok.
Let’s go back to the immediacy of the Brook dismissal, which brought Jacob Bethell, who will soon become the youngest man to lead England, to the middle. Bethell had made a half-century in the second innings of each of his three previous Tests, all in New Zealand in December, but this was different. This was pressure; the left-hander was playing his first game of the series, slotting in at the No. 6 position that Ben Stokes had made his own. He was jumpy, anxious, edgy; Siraj and even Akash gave him nothing to score off, so it was no surprise that when Prasidh came back for what became his final spell, Bethell optimistically charged the pacer and managed an inside-edge on to his middle-stump.
Perceptibly, the dynamics shifted and the pressure got to even Root, by now having brought up his 39th century and becoming Test cricket’s second highest run-maker, behind Sachin Tendulkar. Prasidh, on a mission, produced a wobble-seam delivery that angled in, straightened and evoked a tentative prod from a man on 105 that took the edge on its way to the wicketkeeper. Prasidh roared, The Oval echoed with a collective roar of its own. India had the bit between its teeth; it would return the following morning for 56 dramatic minutes to seal a magnificent six-run win, Prasidh’s final act an express full ball that accounted for Josh Tongue.
Prasidh Krishna and Mohammed Siraj gave skipper Shubman Gill plenty to celebrate in the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy.
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Getty Images
Despite playing only three of the five matches, the aggressive Prasidh ended up with 14 wickets, the joint fourth highest across teams, alongside Bumrah and behind only Siraj, Tongue and Stokes. His economy of 4.94 was easily the highest of all bowlers with more than two wickets but wait — Prasidh boasted a strike-rate of 45 (that’s seven-and-a-half overs per wicket) which was topped only by Tongue (40.10) among bowlers from both sides that had played more than one Test.
Pause for a moment, and let that sink in. For all his profligacy, Prasidh took his wickets quicker than Siraj (48.39) and Bumrah, who needed 51.28 balls per success. If he is viewed as an attacking prospect in the short-to-mid-term, who can argue with that line of thought?
Prasidh is the first to acknowledge the need to keep his economy under check. It was a task he performed with aplomb in the climactic stages of the Oval Test, when he bowled fast and furious without losing his discipline, but he is aware that in the long run, he can’t afford to leak boundaries by the bagful.
Three or four good deliveries in an over have invariably been offset by at least one four-ball, and while it’s a worthy trade-off when the wickets keep coming, there is something to be said for the value of building pressure through dot balls and maiden overs, which are generally the bread-and-butter of fast bowling on batter-friendly pitches that are currently the norm in England, at the very least.
That he is a wicket-taking bowler is evidenced from 22 scalps from six Tests, all of them overseas — two in South Africa, one in Australia and now three in England. With a big question mark hanging over Bumrah’s sustained availability and the likes of Akash and Mukesh Kumar struggling for both fitness and consistent penetration, Prasidh has emerged as the ideal foil to Siraj, now primed to take over as the fast-bowling spearhead for some time to come.
Prasidh’s big tests lie immediately ahead of him, assuming he gets to play against the West Indies and South Africa at home in October and November respectively.
India is unlikely to go in with more than two quicks, at the most, and whether the Karnataka man figures in the XI will depend on Bumrah’s status and whether the think-tank feels Siraj needs a break after his extraordinary exploits in England. It won’t be lost on Prasidh that he will have only a bit part to play in India’s backyard, where spin is likely to be the preferred mode of destruction despite the misadventure against New Zealand last year.
As such, he will need to be more on point, keeping an eye on his economy while providing the cutting edge with the new SG Test ball that he is more familiar with than the Kookaburra and the Duke’s with which he has operated hitherto in the five-day game.
Seemingly having put his injury woes behind him, Prasidh can expect a decent run in the next few years if he can build on his English gains. He might be a late bloomer, but that’s precisely what could work in his favour in an era where workload management has become such a misused phrase.