India 248-4 at lunch (Rahul 98*, Pant 74) trail England 387 by 139
Rishabh Pant’s dash for a single he never needed turned a near-perfect session into a slightly deflated one for India. With the interval one ball away, Pant tapped Ben Stokes into the leg side and set off, hoping to put KL Rahul back on strike so the opener could complete a seventh Test hundred. Stokes spun, fired from mid-on and hit the keeper’s end. Pant, batting with a sore left index finger, was short of his ground and England finally had something to shout about.
‘You take any wicket here, but that one felt big,’ Stokes told Sky Sports as the sides walked off. ‘Pant can turn a game in half an hour. Direct hits are 50-50; today it came off.’
Until that moment India had controlled the third morning. They added 103 in 22.3 overs, scarcely a false stroke in sight, and forced Joe Root to shuffle through six bowlers on an increasingly benevolent surface.
Rahul, resuming on 74, looked unhurried. A checked drive off James Anderson brought his first boundary of the day; a late dab past gully off Jofra Archer nudged him into the nineties. Otherwise he dealt almost exclusively in low-risk singles. Since regaining his Test spot in 2021, Rahul has struck four centuries away from home – no India batter has managed more in that period – and he gave no hint that a fifth was troubling him. ‘I wasn’t counting,’ he insisted to BBC radio. ‘If the hundred comes it comes; the bigger goal is getting close to England’s total.’
Pant, by contrast, was all invention. He began by charging Archer, trying to scoop the first ball of the day over fine leg to break a run of 25 consecutive dots. Later he reverse-ramped Mark Wood for a single, then clouted Moeen Ali into the Grand Stand for his 88th Test six – two shy of Virender Sehwag’s India record. Every so often he flexed the damaged finger, grimaced, then played on.
Stokes sensed that only raw pace or a mistake would shift the left-hander, so he reverted to the short-ball plan that has served him well as captain. In a five-over burst the all-rounder bowled 26 deliveries either short or back of a length, regularly touching 90 mph. The breakthrough, though, arrived via his arm in the field rather than the ball in his hand.
The dismissal briefly roused a subdued crowd and an England side that had been second-best. Archer, operating from the Pavilion End, found lively bounce without reward; Anderson had a couple of half-shouts for lbw that Hawkeye showed sliding down leg. Wood hurried Pant once or twice but leaked boundaries. Root’s lone spinner, Moeen, offered control but little threat.
‘England have bowled okay, they just haven’t asked enough questions often enough,’ former captain Alastair Cook noted on TMS. ‘Rahul’s left anything he could leave and Pant punished anything loose.’
India will begin the afternoon 139 behind with six wickets in hand and the second new ball 22 overs away. Rahul is joined by Ravindra Jadeja, whose recent Test batting record is sturdy enough to steady immediate nerves. Yet Pant’s late exit means England can attack a fresh batter and a slightly older ball with renewed purpose.
Momentum, for what it is worth, is balanced on a knife-edge. The hosts will feel they have prised a door ajar; India will argue one error does not erase two hours of dominance. Either way, the run-out ensures the first spell after lunch carries extra weight – and Rahul, stranded two short of a deserved century, knows he must start again.
‘That’s Test cricket,’ he said with a shrug. ‘You get a punch, you give one back. Let’s see who lands the next one.’
