Andy Zaltzman: England win condemns India to the Inverted Podium of Rabbitery

Weekly stat: Since Stokes and McCullum took charge, England have been involved in five Tests in which 1,400 or more runs have been scored by both teams combined. They have won all of them. Over the previous 15 years, from summer 2007 to the end of the 2021-22 season, England were involved in 14 Tests of 1,400-plus runs, of which they won three, lost three, and drew eight. From 1930 to 1989, England were involved in 15 such Tests, and won none.

Traditionally, when Test cricket teams have convened at a pre-match strategy session, they have not expected to be told by their number-crunching data wonks that conceding more than 800 runs in the match gives you a 75% chance of victory.

Tradition, however, is becoming increasingly accustomed to being fed through the shredder, particularly in England.

At Headingley, England conceded 835 runs in the match – the fourth highest match total conceded by a winning team. Ben Stokes’s England also sit in third place on that list (837, against New Zealand at Trent Bridge in June 2022). And in second place (847, versus Pakistan, Rawalpindi, December 2022).

They conceded 875 to India in Rajkot last February, and were thrashed, and exactly 800 to New Zealand to lose the third Test in December, but 800 is not more than 800 (and they were 2-0 up in the series), so the stat stands – three wins out of four more-than-800-conceded Tests.

England had never previously won a Test match in which they had conceded 800, and had only twice won after conceding 750 or more, the most recent of which games was at the SCG in December 1903.

Headingley, in addition to its gripping dramatic fluctuations, was a statistically extraordinary match. It was only the third Test played in which all four innings exceeded 350 (and just the 15th with four 300-run innings).

The match aggregate of 1,673 was the 10th highest in Test history, and third highest in England. Stokes was the third captain to win the toss, choose to bowl first, concede a first-innings score of 450 or more, and still win the match. He had also been the second to do so, against New Zealand at Trent Bridge in 2022, when the Kiwis scored 553 after being put in.

It was the first instance, in the 63,000-match history of first-class cricket, of a team posting at least five centuries as well as six or more ducks, and the first time that a team which scored five hundreds has lost the match.

India’s top five made 721 runs in the game, from 1,108 balls (two more than England’s entire team faced in the match), smashing the record for most runs by a top five in a Test defeat, long held by Norman Yardley’s England side that lost on the same ground to Don Bradman’s invincible Australians in 1948 despite the top five amassing 697 runs.

Demoted to fourth place is the Pakistan top five which scored 609 in Rawalpindi in December 2022, before becoming another victim of Stokes’s alchemic ability to win a Test in which his team concedes stacks of runs.

That Indian top order, however, could not provide enough runs to compensate for a historically, almost heroically, inept performance by their tailenders. Numbers 8 to 11 made a total of nine runs in the two innings combined, the joint worst such total ever recorded by a team in a Test in England whose tail has batted in both innings.

Shardul Thakur, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Siraj and Prasidh Krishna take bottom spot on the Inverted Podium Of Rabbitery by virtue of making those nine runs for the loss of seven wickets, whereas Australia’s 8 to 11 at Old Trafford in 1968 boasted two not outs alongside their six failures (and won the match regardless).

The ability of England’s bowlers to extract the opposition in both innings of a high-scoring Test has been a recurring hallmark of Stokes’s England. On surfaces and in match situations which all cricketing precedents suggest should produce a draw at best, Stokes, his bowlers and his team are sustained by the knowledge that they have won such matches, and can do so again.

Their opponents are also aware that, against this England team on a flat pitch, they can lose in weird and wonderful ways, a haunting knowledge that seemed to grip India as soon as the lower order began to creak, and as soon as Bumrah failed to replicate his first-innings wizardry, blunted by the deadening Leeds pitch and the superb, selectively cautious England batting.

India have lost seven out of their last nine Tests, their worst run since the late 1960s. They will need better catching, better non-Bumrah bowling, and, above all, next time they are apparently cruising against a flagging bowling attack, they will need to remember that, these days in Test cricket, even a shark in a tank of formaldehyde is not necessarily dead.

Photograph by Gareth Copley/Getty Images