Are England's attack a group of individuals or can they mesh together, asks Ben Gardner from Headingley.
In the age of the renter, that awkward first flatshare encounter is a rite of passage. Are we sharing milk or splitting? Oh, you’ve taken that cupboard shelf? No, it’s fine, it’s just that’s my pasta on the left. Someone’s bought a nine pack of toilet paper but it’s the rough stuff that helps no one. Am I weird if I have my own toilet paper?
There was a similar first-day-of-term feeling at Leeds among England’s bowlers. It wasn’t quite Chris Woakes going in for a handshake as Josh Tongue attempted a hug, but it wasn’t far off. You could see it coming too.
“The bowlers worry me. They really do worry me,” Stephen Harmison told Betway before the Test. “I say this with a bit of trepidation, but I have to question what our bowling identity is. For me, a bowling identity wins you Test series and wins you Test matches.” He would largely be proven right across a hard-to-parse two stints in the field at Headingley.
All of England’s attack bowled well at times. Chris Woakes beat the bat time and again, and somehow the only catch taken off his bowling was by himself. Ben Stokes was England’s best bowler in the first innings. Brydon Carse rose ably to the new-ball challenge, dismissing three of the top four in the second innings, including Yashasvi Jaiswal with one of the best non-Bumrah balls of the game. Josh Tongue might finally be the answer to England’s age-old tail-lopping problem, even if India’s nine, ten and Jack are a throwback to the days when bowlers could just be bowlers. On another day, he’d have had KL Rahul and Rishabh Pant both caught in the slips, but the former was dropped and for the latter there were none in place.
That, of course, is the Pant effect, the hard-won prize for all his heady misadventure, and the middle session, was about as frazzled as Stokes has looked as Test captain. He’s impossible to plan or set a field for when not even he knows his next move, exhorting himself to play straight before ending up in a heap having scooped over the keeper’s head. He has three shots in mind for any one ball and three celebrations up his sleeve for when he reaches his hundred. He might need to restock his supply of the latter for the rest of the series.
For a while, England had no answer. Shoaib Bashir, who neither contained nor threatened in the game, got smashed, leaving him unable to follow his intended plan of the spinner containing from one end and the quicks rotating at the other. In the process, he seemed to forget about Woakes, unbowled between lunch and tea. Who should bowl when and with whom at the other end and to what field and with what plan in mind: These are things that are taken for granted when a bowling attack is established, but England aren’t there yet.
All through the game there was a sense of pieces that could fit together but weren’t quite in the right places, of an attack not just learning but also getting to know each other on the job. That will come in time, but time is what England don’t have. They could be 0-1 down by the end of tomorrow. Another defeat would leave them in must-win territory. Their laudable attempts to build a stable of fast bowlers contributes as well. Mixing and matching from a pool of eight or nine is a good thing in some ways, but each combination complementing or clashing in various ways.
Woakes aside, the bowlers themselves are also relatively unknown quantities. You could see Stokes trying to work out what Sam Cook was and wasn’t capable of as he instructed him to bowl a spell of bouncers against Zimbabwe. Carse and Tongue are each in their late twenties, but have both had up and down careers, England fast-tracking them into the Test team as soon as they sensed they were good enough, and perhaps before they themselves fully understood their own games.
“The current bowlers don’t bowl anywhere near enough, they get injured a lot, and there’s not a level of consistency to performances,” added Harmison. “We haven’t really identified what our best four bowlers are or what are the strongest characteristics from our four bowlers to build an attack for a game plan. They’re bowling to suit their individual needs rather than helping the man at the other end and trying to create partnerships.”
England’s post Broaderson transition has, in one way, gone as well as they could have hoped. They now have several Test-capable seamers in their stable. And for all the moments India felt like they were pulling away, England go into the final day with a realistic shot at victory. The firmest of friendships have to start somewhere. England’s nervy housemates may well be swapping ingredients and settling onto the sofa for an evening of The Traitors before we know it.
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