by Arunabha Sengupta
1 August 2018. First Test. Day 2. Session 2.
Lunch had been taken at 76 for 3, young Sam Curran having polished off the Indian top-order. Suddenly the England first innings score of 287 had looked quite substantial.
After the break, Stokes was put on at one end. Kohli steered him for four, and then drove him through the covers for another. The first over produced 9.
And then came that riveting period of play. A 10-over phase, during which a mere 17 runs were scored, 2 wickets were lost, two catches went begging and a reprieve was obtained through a review.
Decent amount of help for the seamers, the bowlers sending down testing spells.
Running in from one end was Anderson. At the other end was Stokes, bowling at his very best. One of the very best in the business of seam and swing was out there to prove a point. The other a maverick all-rounder, showing indications of having got his mojo back to the brimful.
The Duke ball was being made to talk eloquently from both ends.
And one of the best batsmen of the world was resisting them with his bat, heart and soul, eager to make a mark in the only land that had denied him success so far.
It was cricket at its most dramatic.
Often events registered in the scorebooks as a dot ball, but the atmosphere became tense enough to be cut with a knife.
Five of the overs were bowled by Stokes, costing 6 runs in exchange of both the wickets.
Ajinkya Rahane was induced to flirt with one that moved away, managing to touch one to the slips after playing and missing several times. Dinesh Karthik played outside the line of a late in-swinger and lost his middle-stump.
Hardik Pandya was spilt at first slip by Alastair Cook, and was given out leg-before before the reviews showed it was missing leg.
Even Kohli was made to turn square and miss a delivery that zipped through and would have been impossible to negotiate for any batsman living or dead.
The other five overs were sent down by Anderson, going for 7 runs without a wicket. The ball found Kohli’s edge and it went into the hands of Malan at third slip and out. Several times the edge just about missed the diabolically swinging deliveries.
The line was scrupulously on the off or outside. The movement ever present, often late. The pressure tottering near breaking point.
There was a 26-ball period during which Kohli remained scoreless.
But he fought on.
Men came and went at the other end, they struggled, they survived, they perished. Kohli too struggled, but he carried on.
Second session. 27 overs bowled, 84 runs, for the loss of 3 wickets.
When the umpires called for tea, Virat Kohli walked back … unbeaten on 53, having just survived one of the toughest two-hour periods of his career.
The two middle hours of the day saw him notch 44 runs, off 80 balls.
He was dropped twice, on both occasions by the unfortunate Dawid Malan. The dolly off Anderson. And then almost at the stroke of tea, when he jammed down on a Ben Stokes delivery outside the off. The edge travelled fast and knee-high to Malan’s right. Difficult catch, but can be expected to be held in Test cricket.
At the end of a gruelling session, Kohli was still there. Men had succumbed around him. He had come very, very close to losing his own wicket. But he had hung on.
To use a cliché, this was Test cricket at its sublime best.
After tea he went on to script an epic, one of the greatest knocks ever seen in recent times.
Especially when Umesh Yadav walked out as the last man, he threaded a deep-set field with twos and fours, and one solitary six, in the manner of a master craftsman.
He got 149 of 274. The next highest was Shikhar Dhawan with 26.
But the key phase of play was that 10-over period, during which the Indian skipper scored 5 runs off 31 balls and just about managed to stick it out.
Sometimes, that is all it takes.
In the end, however, India lost the closest of Tests by 31 runs. In spite of a Kohli half century in the second innings.
Like many of the finest efforts in the history of the game, the first-innings gem came in a lost cause. Amateurish number-crunchers will start equating runs scored in wins with value.
But more often than not it is the lost cause that underlines that odds are stacked up against you.
In a team game you cannot win alone. The difference in the probability of win that you make matters. Kohli took it from very low to very high before his eventual demise.
When a visibly relieved Joe Root plonked down on his seat alongside young Sam Curran to field the questions thrown at them in the press conference, he started off by saying, “If anyone is of the opinion that
Test cricket is dying, one should come back and watch this one.”