Josh Tongue’s wild bowling breaks India but England’s fifth-Test hopes hurt by Chris Woakes injury
Josh Tongue’s first ball of this fifth Test at The Oval travelled so far down the off-side it was heading for Lord’s by the time it hit the boundary rope for five wides. A moment later, he sent the ball off in the direction of Eden Gardens for five more. It was one of the worst overs you’re likely to see in a Test match: India hit a solitary single and jumped from 18-1 to 30-1. Tongue was unplayable, just not in the way he might have imagined.
The morning’s conditions had seemed like a bowler’s paradise, on an unpredictable green pitch under skies so murky that groundstaff switched on the floodlights before midday. Shubman Gill lost India’s 15th toss in a row in all formats – a feat with a probability of 1 in 32,768 – and England’s stand-in captain Ollie Pope naturally elected to field.
But England failed to take full advantage, and Tongue was not the only one with a wayward radar. Gus Atkinson, Chris Woakes and Jamie Overton all delivered erratic spells, serving up 15 wides and 30 extras, a generous chunk of India’s 204-6 at stumps.
Atkinson was certainly the pick of the bunch, trapping Yashasvi Jaiswal on his pads, as Pope broke his own unwanted streak of 14 failed DRS attempts and celebrated gleefully like the wicket was his own. Atkinson also pulled off the sharp run out of captain Gill, who momentarily lost his senses running for a single that was never there, before later drawing an edge from Dhruv Jurel.
Woakes, who had lured KL Rahul to chop on to his own stumps, ended with disaster, tumbling over the boundary to save a four and injuring himself in the process. He yelped in pain before being attended to by medics and helped from the field, his arm in the kind of makeshift sling that tends to suggest a dislocated shoulder.
With no specialist spin bowler, England’s remaining three seamers face a heavy workload to finish off this Test. The bigger picture for Woakes is that his hopes of making the Ashes squad this winter are in doubt. Aged 36, there may not be many more opportunities for one of England’s most reliable performers over the past decade and more.
Yet no one encapsulated England’s rollercoaster day more so than Tongue. His disastrous over was a tough watch as his planted foot slipped all over the crease, where a pile of sawdust failed to offer any added grip. He had the ball swinging but that was no good thing, because once it chose its rogue trajectory it was never turning back towards duped wicketkeeper Jamie Smith.
But gradually Tongue steadied himself, and a change of ends by Pope proved wise. He started to find a dangerous length that flirted with the top of off-stump, and his pace cranked up over 90mph. His awkward technique, with a bowling arm which tilts beyond the perpendicular, was sending the ball down at devilish angles which soon brought rewards.
Tongue’s two wickets were almost carbon copies of one another, spearing the ball in towards the left-handers Sai Sudharsan and Ravindra Jadeja from around the wicket, before jagging it off the outside edge and into Smith’s waiting gloves. It was all the more bamboozling that Jadeja’s wicket came at the end of an over which began with more wild, expensive wides.
Perhaps this was the most difficult part of India’s day: not just the hostile batting conditions but the fact that they had no idea what was coming at them at any given moment. At least when facing Jimmy Anderson or Stuart Broad there is a rhythm, a set-up, a storyline they build using in-swingers before, plot twist, the out-swinger. There was little of that consistency here, instead a barrage of balls that were too short, too long, too wide, too bad, and all of a sudden far too good to cope with.
India’s resistance came from the unlikely source of Karun Nair, brought back into the side to beef up the batting in what looked like yet another unconvincing line-up by the tourists in this series, featuring two spinners on a pitch that is a seamer’s dream. Nair dug in, calibrated his line of sight in the darkness and began asserting himself, bringing up a confident 50 shortly before stumps.
And so a day which should have been England’s felt like something of a score draw. England have six wickets, but it cost them 200 runs and a bowler’s shoulder. The next time they will embark on day one of a Test match, England will be walking out at Perth for the start of The Ashes in November. With Jofra Archer rested here and Mark Wood still injured, this was a chance for the support cast to make their pitch for travelling to Australia, but perhaps only Atkinson could claim to have bolstered his case.
Yet oddly, Tongue managed to turn one of the worst mornings of his career into something of a success story, taking two scalps with identical jaffas, ripping it with the sort of pace and height and angle that would come in handy in an Australian summer. About 70 yards behind the beaten batsmen, Stuart Broad nodded his approval up in the commentary box. Around the wicket to left-handers? England used to have someone very good at that.
