The previous time England lost two Tests in a row — the only other time under Ben Stokes — was in the Ashes last year. Headingley was the venue for the following match, prompting one of the stranger dressing-room scenes just before the start, with Mark Wood on all fours barking like a mad dog and Stokes, never one for long team-talks, telling his players: “Let’s beat these bastards.”
They won at Headingley, inspired by mad dog Wood’s thunderbolts, the return of Mr Sensible, Chris Woakes, and the optimism that had not diminished in prior defeats. Because of the length of a Test, the margins of victory and defeat can be exaggerated, which then amplifies the adulation or criticism that follows, in the media and from the general public. The attendant “noise” is just that. Every Test starts afresh.
Each management team will have their own way of trying to engineer a response from their players. When England lost in Adelaide by 275 runs in the most recent Ashes to take place in Australia, Chris Silverwood and Joe Root forced the batsmen to sit through videos of their dismissals and encouraged what Wood called “brutally honest conversations”. The self-laceration didn’t do much good; they lost the next match, in Melbourne, by an innings and 14 runs.
For Brendon McCullum and Stokes, the way forward is to not wallow in the bad news. They try to treat those two impostors, victory and defeat, just the same. This comes partly from experience; both have been around long enough to know the drill. Stokes was asked, for example, whether he had been taken aback by the criticism after the third Test in Rajkot. “It’s sport, isn’t it?” he said. “You get plaudits when it goes well and a bit of shit when it doesn’t.” Indeed.
You can be sure that there was no self-laceration after Rajkot, which is not to say there has been no self-reflection. “I and I’m sure every player in the dressing room has reflected in some way on that game,” Stokes added. “Not on the result, but as long as everyone is reflecting on the game and whether they performed or didn’t perform, then that will give you a chance in the next game to do something better.
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“That’s how I look at wins and defeats. You can have a good game and lose; you can have a bad game and win, so reflecting on your performance as an individual is the most important thing, rather than reflecting on the result itself.
“That’s become easier for us because of the way me and Baz [McCullum] keep the language the same. We never differ from what we said at the outset. A defeat like last week can have a bigger effect on the team than it needs to have. I’m comfortable with how I addressed that. I know and we know it’s the next game that counts.
“I always give off a pretty level vibe when I talk to you guys [the media] and that’s how I am in the dressing room as well. I think at the moment we are just staying calm through whatever goes on in the game and also what goes on at the end of a game. We don’t get too far ahead and we don’t get too down on ourselves when things don’t go too well.”
Maintaining an equilibrium must surely be the best way to go when scrutiny is intense, and the best way to avoid a downward spiral. On a modern tour, with no cricket in between the high-profile international matches, the danger of such a spiral is always present, but, as Stokes emphasised, it is the next match that counts, not the last.
So there has been an upbeat air to England’s training sessions in Ranchi, the city of MS Dhoni — about 2,000km due east from Rajkot — where Stokes himself has put in a lengthy shift of bowling (35 minutes) in the nets. At the start of this tour he promised he would not jump the gun and bowl in a match situation, but he has progressed more quickly than hoped and it may be that we see him operate with the ball at some stage over the next two Tests.
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Ranchi has only ever staged two Tests, both reasonably high-scoring affairs, with more than 2,000 runs across both games, but there are expectations of a lower-scoring shoot-out this time. The surface is dry and cracked in parts, to the extent that Stokes said he had not seen one like it before and had no clue how it will play. Like a blind date, it’s best not to prejudge matters and see how things pan out when the fourth Test gets under way on Friday.
• Ben Stokes: I’ve not seen a pitch like this – there are a lot of cracks
After a final look at the surface the day before, two changes were made with Ollie Robinson replacing Wood and Shoaib Bashir returning in place of Rehan Ahmed. Both changes made sense: the quick turnaround counted against Wood, while on a pitch expected to turn, the consistency of Bashir’s finger-spin is preferable to Ahmed’s inconsistent leg spinners.
Robinson plays his first match of any cricket for seven months. His record in Test cricket (and first-class cricket) is outstanding and he has shown, not least in Pakistan last winter, that his skills are not reliant on the green, green grass of home, but his fitness has been questionable and his attitude towards it was not appreciated by the previous regime. He has looked much trimmer here in India. This is an opportunity for him to remind everyone of his capabilities and his readiness for the contest.
Wisely, England opted against playing the extra batsman, Dan Lawrence, a consideration only if Stokes himself could play a full part as an all-rounder and if the expectation was for the kind of pitch on which Joe Root took five wickets for eight runs in Ahmedabad in 2021. Jonny Bairstow, playing his 99th Test, is retained in place of Lawrence.
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Bairstow, like Root, has been out of form but will be buoyed by the absence of Jasprit Bumrah, who did not make the journey to Ranchi. Bumrah is a hard bowler to face whatever the situation, but especially so for the middle order, when the ball is old and has begun to reverse-swing. He will be fresh for the final Test in Dharamsala.
• Bazball at key juncture – will Root and Bairstow stick or twist?
Whether that will be a live Test remains to be seen, not that Stokes will be encouraging his players to focus so far ahead. “We take every game as it comes,” he said. “That’s what we have done ever since I started as captain and we’ll try to play to the best of our capabilities.
“You will have good days and bad days, good games and bad games. Going out there and sticking to the way that we know allows us to play our best cricket is what we constantly focus on. That’s what we’ll be doing in this game, the next game and other games, too.”
England team: Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett, Ollie Pope, Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow, Ben Stokes (captain), Ben Foakes (wicketkeeper), Tom Hartley, Ollie Robinson, James Anderson, Shoaib Bashir.
Fourth Test
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India v England
JSCA Stadium, Ranchi
Friday, 4am
TV Sky Sports Cricket
