Michael Vaughan rocks India; misses double ton
Faisal Shariff
A 165-run partnership between Michael Vaughan, who missed his first double century by three runs, and Mark Butcher gave England a firm grip on the second Test on the third day at Trent Bridge, Nottingham.
England finished at 341-5, trailing the Indian total by 16 runs with five wickets in hand and two days' play still left. Bad light ended the day nine overs short of the rescheduled 105 overs.
Morning Session:
Harbhajan Singh cracked the second fastest half-century in England, off 33 deliveries, as the Indian first innings folded up for 357.
With almost a day's cricket lost in the game to rain, only an English batting collapse will hold any chance of a result.
England went into lunch at 46 for no loss, in 14 overs.
Yesterday, the covers were pulled off 40 minutes before play began, at twenty past two, leaving a lot of dampness on the wicket. This morning, with England sure to bat in the first session, they were taken off much earlier to help the wicket dry soon, which prompted Sunil Gavaskar to hint at an English scheme. It would be interesting to see if match referee Clive Lloyd rakes up the issue with the authorities.
Harbhajan Singh rediscovered his batting prowess and in the company of Zaheer Khan dealt in boundaries, smashing seven inside the first five overs.
Matthew Hoggard was the prime casualty, with two boundaries that pierced the slip cordon taken off him.
Getting his eye in, Harbhajan Singh played a well-timed drive wide of mid-on. Andy Flintoff suffered a similar fate. Zaheer Khan also socked Hoggard through mid-wicket as the duo put on a 50-run partnership, off 51 balls, for the ninth wicket.
Harbhajan Singh, using his supple wrists effectively, flicked Flintoff off his toes to the square-leg fence and then played the shot of the day, a cracking cover drive off the back foot for three.
A brazen smack that flew over cover got the offspinner to his half-century off just 33 balls, equalling Kapil Dev's 1982 effort at Manchester. He immediately leapt and smiled proudly towards the dressing room. He later revealed that he had won a £1000 bet with V V S Laxman that he would score a half-century.
The Indian tail had finally wagged and Harbhajan Singh drove Stephen Harmison through the covers for his tenth boundary. His fortuitous knock finally ended when a delivery from Harmison kicked up and ballooned towards the covers. Hussain rushed in and took a sharp, sliding catch.
Ashish Nehra was dismissed for a duck when Hoggard swung one away into the gloves of Alec Stewart behind the wicket and the Indian innings folded up for 357, the last five batsmen contributing a useful 102 runs.
The Indian batting, barring Wasim Jaffer's first innings blob and Sachin Tendulkar's malfunction, seemed to have come good to fight back from a Test down in the series.
England innings:
The Indian seamers Nehra and Khan failed to reproduce Hoggard's bending deliveries and lost the chance to grab an early wicket. Nehra's deliveries were angled across the batsmen and, barring the odd delivery that curled away, debutant Robert Key and Michael Vaughan were never threatened.
Key played with composure. After a productive winter with Rodney Marsh's academy in Australia he looks primed for the opening slot in Marcus Trescothick's absence. With Graham Thorpe's sabbatical from the game, Vaughan might have to consolidate the middle order, allowing Key and Trescothick to take the top honours.
Indian coach John Wright had tipped Key as a batsman to watch out for during his coaching stint with Kent two seasons ago.
Vaughan, with a century in the last innings at Lord's, cover-drove and flicked the Indian seamers smoothly. His ability to keep the score moving without much bustle makes him England's best batsman in the absence of Trescothick and the beleaguered Thorpe.
India missed its best chance to get a wicket when Harbhajan Singh got a faint edge off Vaughan's bat in the last over before lunch. The ball, after pitching on middle, turned viciously, feathered off Vaughan's bat and ricocheted off Parthiv Patel's gloves before falling dead on the grass.
Standing back to the seamers, Patel's keeping seemed impressive as he did all the right things -- fingers pointing towards the ground when collecting the ball, waiting for the ball instead of grabbing at it. His keeping to Harbhajan Singh will, however, catalogue his abilities over the next two sessions.
Post-lunch session:
If India goes on to lose the game, this session will be seen as the period that led to the defeat.
England were 201-1 and closing in rapidly on the Indian first innings total of 357 with another session of two-and-a-half hours to be played.
Ashish Nehra dug one in short and Robert Key played the ball on to his stumps looking to work the ball down to the leg side.
In a rather listless hour after lunch for India, the hosts swelled in confidence and scored at almost four runs an over.
If India seemed to have worked out their batting woes, the seamers refused to learn from their earlier mistakes. For the English batsmen it couldn't have been any easier than this. With the seamers spraying the ball, there was a four for the taking in every over.
The Indian fielders goofed on their basics as overthrows and misfields marred the hour. With the seamers failing to bowl in the right channel, Vaughan milked the bowling, picking the gaps despite a seven-on-the-off field. Such was his brilliance that not once did his batting seem brutal. There were no ugly strokes, just pure timing.
Vaughan brings a studied intensity to striking the ball. Unlike his last century at Lord's, this innings had him playing straighter and in front of the wicket. He cover-drove the seamers regularly, sometimes rocking off the back foot and at other times meeting the ball early on the front foot.
Mark Butcher was a study in contrast, struggling at the crease with his feet stuck to the line. Unable to read Harbhajan Singh's off-cutters, he just about managed to survive the onslaught.
With his strokes safely tucked away in his kit back in the pavilion, luck was the only thing that accompanied Butcher to the crease. He survived a caught-and-bowled chance scooping the ball back to Harbhajan Singh, who made a valiant diving attempt, but failed to hold on to the ball.
Just as the dish was getting sour for skipper Sourav Ganguly, he was served some more when umpire Russell Tiffin gave a second warning to Zaheer Khan for running on the pitch.
Ganguly also failed to get his field settings right yet again or to exert pressure on Butcher by employing another spinner (Virendra Sehwag or Sachin Tendulkar) along with Harbhajan Singh. Several strokes went past backward point and leg slip, which were left unguarded.
Flicking Ganguly to square leg for a couple, Michael Vaughan conjured up a truly memorable summer, irrespective of how he fares from here on, with his third Test century.
A Test century in 123 balls would seem to be a whirlwind exhibition of hitting, but Vaughan, with his ability to rotate the strike, timed the ball sweetly and found the fence with alarming regularity. If there was any ruthlessness in his batting it was well concealed by a veneer of composure.
Ajit Agarkar's inclusion in the side seemed to be a bad bet despite his contribution with the bat. He began with a long hop with enough width for the batsman to swing at it. Vaughan swivelling on his toes sent it packing to the mid-on fence. Butcher, growing in confidence, dispatched a half volley through point. He finally broke through Harbhajan Singh's hold, straight-driving him for four.
After Ganguly overstepped for the better part of the two overs he bowled, he finally tossed the ball to Tendulkar. And the ball, which until then had travelled like a ray of light, began misbehaving. Every ball was bowled with a plan in mind -- he swung two balls away and then brought one back in. Sehwag also turned his arm around, but failed to get his skipper the elusive breakthrough.
India's best bowler on show, Zaheer Khan, bowled just two overs in the post-lunch session as Ganguly persisted with Nehra and Harbhajan Singh. Why Khan, with figures of eight overs for 31 runs, was taken off while the expensive Nehra continued to bowl remains another of Ganguly's mysterious tactics.
Post-tea session:
Butcher cut Nehra straight to Wasim Jaffer at gully. With the batsman refusing to walk, the third umpire was consulted and replays confirmed the ball had touched the grass. Butcher stayed on. If only Agarkar had shown the same presence of mind when he walked yesterday without waiting for the third umpire to be called in when Butcher took a catch at third man.
Butcher registered his half-century trying to drive Nehra and getting a thick edge to fly over the slips to the third-man fence.
Harbhajan Singh then tossed one up and found the edge of Butcher's bat. The ball flew to first slip where Rahul Dravid made no mistake and an innings of 53 carved out of sheer grit came to an end. With it ended the 165-run partnership with Michael Vaughan, who seemed set to reach his maiden double century.
Harbhajan Singh struck again when skipper Nasser Hussain (3) gloved the ball to give Parthiv Patel his maiden Test scalp (228 for 3).
Vaughan continued to enthral with his strokes, forcing Ian Botham to call the Indian attack a buffet party. Vaughan pulled Nehra to the mid-wicket fence with yawning ease and then picked him off the toes to the fine-leg fence. He reached 150 runs off just 187 balls with the majority of his boundaries scored through the covers and mid-wicket.
Sourav Ganguly had had enough and finally decided to reintroduce Zaheer Khan into the attack. Khan accounted for John Crawley almost immediately. The left-handed seamer got one to hit Crawley's pad and bat and the ball flew to Jaffer at gully. Umpire Tiffin agreed with the second appeal for the catch after turning down the first one for leg before and Crawley was gone for 22.
England had lost three wickets inside the first hour after tea and India seemed to have started clawing back into the game with the hosts 272-4.
But Vaughan was beyond good today as he played with an inner glow that embraced copybook batting and class in large measure. Vaughan is a batsman in the mould of Mark Waugh, killing the enemy with a quiet endurance.
Ganguly missed another trick when he failed to torment Vaughan with Tendulkar's swinging posers. Of all the Indian bowlers who had bowled a minimum of two overs at the Yorkshireman, Tendulkar was the only one who had managed to plug him. Vaughan scored just five runs off the 18 balls he faced from the little master. How something so apparent could evade the skipper's brain is baffling.
Agarkar -- who bowled two expensive spells of three overs each -- came back towards the end and bowled with more thought than he has through the series so far, curling the ball away from Alec Stewart and Vaughan.
Vaughan got early into position and drove Agarkar through extra cover to race to 197. Seeing the next ball pitched outside off, Vaughan's eyes lit up like neon signs and he went into the drive, only to edge to wicket-keeper Patel. Vaughan had scored his runs off 258 balls spiked with 23 boundaries. A sporting Ganguly walked up and patted him on the back even as the batsman reconciled himself to the fact that he will probably never find conditions so suited to scoring a Test double hundred.
Stewart and Flintoff then held the innings together as India looked to finish the 105 overs scheduled for the day to make up for lost time. But in a surprising move, the umpires offered the light to the batsmen who marched off quickly, much to Ganguly's dismay, with nine overs remaining.
England are 341-5 with Stewart on a breezy 30 and Flintoff on two having faced just six balls.
