England v India – live! | Rob Smyth and Alan Gardner

• Press F5 or auto refresh for the latest news • Email rob.smyth@guardian.co.uk with your Friday-night tales and more •  Follow the match with our desktop scoreboard 125th over: England 469-3 (Bell 187, Anderson 9) Anderson gets his first boundary, flipping a short ball from Ishant Sharma round the corner. The Indians don’t seem to like Anderson, presumably because he has a lot to say with the ball. Anderson has white-line fever in many ways, because he seems a very polite and almost shy chap off the field. “I do find something fascinating about yesterday’s nightwatchman grumbles,” says Lee Rodwell. “Channel 5′s highlights managed to mention it 3-4 times in the space of 5 minutes – all in a tone of utter disbelief. I know it’s the nature of the Englishthe mediathe English media to find something to complain about, but really… You have batsmen at Nos 5 and 6 very much playing for their places, the former having been padded up for something like six hours, it’s not rocket science why the decision was made. Is it really so difficult just to enjoy an English management team that, right now, is getting almost everything right? Lord(‘s) knows we’ve had plenty of years enjoying the exact opposite.” You can obviously understand people finding it odd, but at the moment Andy Flower could open the batting with himself and Dolly Parton and most of us would support his decision. 124th over: England 462-3 (Bell 186, Anderson 3) There will be 98 overs today, as we’re still catching up from Thursday. The first is bowled by Sreesanth, and Bell tucks the third ball crisply off the hip for four. Sreesanth then gives Anderson a stare after a dot ball at the end of the over. It’s 462 for three, mate. “Going back a tad if I may, I think we can all be forgiven our trespasses against Ian Ronald,” says Nick Lewis. ” Our ambivalence, even latterly, in the face of his obvious brilliance. It goes back to the 05 Ashes I think; his fresh-faced schoolboy appearance and demeanour, skittishly, coltishly hopping around the crease in defence, against Warne in particular. His more recent uncanny ability to make big scores after his predecessors had done the hard work. Some players arrive in international cricket and just belong, look the part, straight away; Trescothick for example. Bell, like a beautiful actress struggling to be taken seriously as an artiste, has had to work at it. For this we must love him all the more.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. I really couldn’t, which is a little alarming given that I’m paid to do precisely that. An email “I know the Gladwell phrase ‘Tipping Point’ is overused,” begins Gary Naylor, lining up the inevitable ‘but’, “but England appear to have reached a number of them at once. The captain is secure in the role as long as he wants it (as were Big Clive, King Viv, MA Taylor and SR Waugh); the batting doesn’t just run deep, but it’s trusted to run deep (as Australia were able to trust Gilchrist in Tests and Bichel in ODIs to rescue any position) so alarm bells don’t really sound and all the batsmen can play their natural games; and the bowlers know that function matters more than form – do their job properly and they will be selected. Strikes me that these characteristics are useful alone, but are so embedded and mutually reinforcing that oppositions can become demoralised over a Test and series. Thus the tipping point arrives and England don’t just play well but they induce, nay force, the opposition to play badly. It’s happening too often for it to be chance and we recognise its power from the great dominant teams of the past. It’s traditional at this moment to write, ‘It’ll never last,’ but it might…” I hate to say this, because the thought of sustained English success will never truly compute, but I think you might be right. England have slaughtered Australia on their own patch in a way that nobody – not even the 1980s West Indies – managed, and now they are giving India their biggest pasting for at least a decade, probably longer. I think the key point you make is that it’s not just the opposition playing badly; it’s England making them play badly. Perhaps the best single example of that was the dodgy shot Dravid played on the last morning at Lord’s. That wasn’t a fluke, it was the consequence of incessant, asphyxiating pressure. They are, in the very nicest sense, a team of heartless swines. It’s just business. The other quality that England have, one that is almost exclusively the preserve of great teams, is that they are stimulated rather than cowed by the really big games. In the last year England have played their best cricket against Australia and India, not Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. It is important we don’t get carried away, at least until they have won a big series or two on the subcontinent, but there is a significant chance we will look back on this series – and specifically the Trent Bridge Test – as the moment when England imperceptibly moved from very good to great. The best part of today’s play might be the luncheon interval: this week, Sky’s Saturday Story is the infamous contretemps between Dennis Lillee and Javed Miandad . Statgasm department Since his coming-of-age century in the Boxing Day Test of 2009, Ian Bell averages 91.10 from 19 Tests . Not quite uber-Bradman, then, but to be an ersatz Bradman isn’t so bad either. The hat The auction for this England lovely hat, signed by the Brisbane Three , ends on Monday. The bidding has reached £300. Do I hear £300.01? It’s all for an extremely worthy cause: the OBO end-of-season bender the Mines Advisory Group . Preamble Hello. Growing up is hard to do, as those of you reading this while playing Warhammer, watching Danger Mouse DVDs and studying for your seventh university degree at the age of 43 will probably testify. But the advantage of a long and painful growing-up process is that the eventual fulfilment is so much more rewarding. Just look at Ian Bell. There were times during the first five years of his Test career, as yet another absent-minded fiddle ended up in the hands of first slip, when even the 8000-at-45 Club doubted whether he would ever achieve his potential, yet in the last 18 months he has done so in wonderful style. He has even had a name change, from Ian Bloody Bell to the suitably regal Ian Ronald Bell. Bell will resume on 181 this morning, with England 457 for three, and he has a great chance to reach his first Test double hundred. (Please, can we ban the phrase “Daddy hundred” now; it was quite fun at first but now it just sounds creepy, like something David Lynch might come up with, with Alastair Cook looking in the mirror, seeing the face of Killer Bob/Ishant Sharma, and dementedly repeating the phrase “Daddy hundred” while cackling .) Depending on England’s tactics, he might even have a chance to make 300. This Test is England’s, to do with as they please. They could bat on to 700 and let the pitch break up; they could declare as soon as Bell gets out or reaches 200; they could even engage the wick of the cricketing gods by batting on to 1000. It’s an extraordinary and surreal position to be in, not least because England seem to be in this position almost every Test at the moment. As England cricket fans, this is the time of our lives. It’s certainly the time of Ian Bell’s. India in England 2011 Cricket Over by over reports Rob Smyth Alan Gardner guardian.co.uk

Posted by on August 20, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.