Way back in the depths of day one, when the temperature in Rajkot was cool, when Sarfaraz Khan was just a kid with the highest first-class average of any current player, England had India completely on the rack.
It was a magical three quarters of an hour, the pale faces in the crowd, in their football shirts and sunhats, buying sweetmeats from the hawkers, watching in some amazement as Rohit Sharma won the toss for the second time in a row, chose to bat, and India folded to 33 for three.
Mark Wood, who hadn’t taken a wicket with the new ball for England since 2015, was given the shiny red cherry. It was not necessarily a golden handshake on a pitch that has a reputation as a welcoming batting paradise.
But the promised “paata” had a little bit of nip first thing, and Wood was steaming in like a giant puppy with pink velvet paws, frolicking with empty cardboard boxes between balls but baring his teeth in delivery. The young Indian princelings of the series to date were duly befuddled by his pace and control.
In Wood’s second over, Yashasvi Jaiswal, with leaden back foot, wafted, the ball landing in the hands of Joe Root at slip. Minutes later, Shubman Gill had gone too. Bewitched by an inducker the previous ball, he pushed with concrete hands at a 90mph monster with a hint of away movement, and it was gathered safely by Ben Foakes behind the stumps. The double centurion and centurion from the second Test, safely dispatched back to their dressing room.
The dark arts continued as Ben Stokes beckoned for Tom Hartley to replace James Anderson with just 40 minutes gone, and he struck immediately. Rajat Patidar, all of two Tests vintage, poked at a ball that stuck in the pitch, which then looped kindly to Ben Duckett waiting at short cover. Only Sharma, exasperation oozing out of every pore, and home boy Ravindra Jadeja, stood between England and the two debutants stacking the rest of the middle order. Stokes, who had earlier been presented with his “it’s just a number” 100th cap in the privacy of the dressing room, licked his lips.
Wood had one ace more up his sleeve in his first spell, muscling a ball into the pitch, the extra bounce catching Sharma unaware, even as he took flight himself. It slammed into the grill of his helmet; a fried egg slapped passive-aggressively onto a plate.
It was quite the blow, and worse could have followed for India when Sharma, on 27, followed up a couple of rasping boundaries off Hartley with an ugly heave, edging the ball low into the slips where Root was waiting. But Root was milliseconds too slow, and the ball slipped past his fingertips to the ground. When an LBW decision was overturned off Anderson in the next over, you got the feeling that there was something in the water for Sharma. And so it played out, as he and Jadeja slowly rode the waves of England’s early attack.
By mid-afternoon drinks, the partnership had stretched to 100, and by the evening session 200, Sharma with another brilliant hundred under his belt. But though the early momentum had drifted away from England, Wood was not done, two more moments of brilliance left up his sleeve. First, Sharma fell for the bouncer trap, unable to resist the temptation, he miscued a short one to midwicket. There Stokes, delighted, was waiting. The fourth-wicket stand at last broken on 204.
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Wood’s final hand was to shatter a young man’s dream when Sarfaraz, he of a Ranji Trophy batting average of nearly 70, and a painful wait for a space to come up in the Indian top six, diligently obeyed Jadeja’s call for a single. But Jadeja, on 99, changed his mind, Wood scooped up the ball at mid-on and threw down the stranded Sarfaraz’s stumps.
Sarfaraz trudged off, distraught. Sharma, standing in the dressing room in readiness to applaud the Jadeja century, pulled off his orange baseball cap and threw it to the ground in black-and-white movie disgust. Jadeja looked crestfallen, eventually picking up a single, but it was a subdued sword swish that celebrated three figures.
The debutant Sarfaraz, who had run to his parents after being presented with his India cap in the huddle, appeared the real deal. Cut from the comfortable Sharma cloth, he was light on his feet, well-balanced and supremely confident, smashing Hartley for six, and with the pluck to advance to Anderson before late cutting him after Foakes came up to the stumps. It was an assured debut and one that took the guts away from England, after they had at last got rid of Sharma, and after their bumper first hour.
