Well, what were you worried about? That was the message from Joe Root and Jonny Bairstow on Day 5 at Edgbaston as they knocked off the remaining 119 runs with unnerving ease to seal a famous comeback victory for England.
The dramatic turnaround from this England side has been difficult to comprehend. In mere weeks they have gone from a side whose batting line up made a house of cards look like a steady structure to a team who have chased down 279, 299, 296 and now 378 in successive Tests.
Here England barely broke a sweat chasing down 378, their record highest fourth innings chase – eclipsing Headingley 2019 – and the highest fourth innings score chased down by anyone in Edgbaston’s Test history.
Perhaps the most startling thing on Day 5 was how little England’s victory ever looked in doubt. Under ominously cloudy skies and with the consistently excellent Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Shami to call upon, the stage was set for India to at least give their opponents a bit of a scare, a couple of early wickets to charge up their vociferous supporters in the crowd and try and re-expose a few cracks in what was formerly Test cricket’s most brittle batting line up.
And yet, nothing. Root and Bairstow were imperious, India’s misfortune appears to have been to run into two English batsmen seemingly at the very peak of their powers, the pair coming together with England wobbling slightly at 109/3 and casually rattling off an unbeaten partnership of 269 in just 315 balls – the fourth highest partnership ever in the fourth innings of a Test.
Shorn of any real competition between England and India, the real contest on the final morning turned out to be between Root and Bairstow, each approaching three figures and a cavalcade of extraordinary statistics. As it was, Root was the first to his hundred, appropriately enough with a trademark dab down past the slips – somewhat fortuitously bouncing clean over the head of second slip for four in this case – sealing his ninth century against India, the most by any player in Test history.
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It continues Root’s remarkable run of form, he now has 11 Test hundreds since the start of 2021 – more than both Mike Gatting and Paul Collingwood managed in their whole careers – this century making him the first England player since Dennis Compton in 1947 to hit four hundreds in a single Test series, all the more remarkable considering the enormous gap between this Test and the previous four.
It seems like not long ago some were questioning Root’s place in the so-called ‘Fab Four’, his fifty to hundred conversion rate a cause for concern, now he stands alone at the top with 28 Test centuries, Steve Smith and Virat Kohli behind on 27, Kane Williamson on 24. And at the other end England had Bairstow, who brought up his second hundred of the match flicking Ravi Jadeja off his toes for a single, continuing his most extraordinary run of form.
In Bairstow’s last five innings he has made 136 from 92 balls, 162 from 157, 71* from 44, 106 from 140 and 114* from 145 – an almost indescribably good 589 runs from 578 balls at an average of 196.
Bairstow now has six Test hundreds in 2022 – the equal most in a calendar year for England along with Compton in 1947, Michael Vaughan in 2002 and Root in 2021 – and it’s still only the start of July. His biggest challenger for the record appears once again to be Root, who has five and counting this year as well.
Faced with England’s Yorkshire duo in this kind of form perhaps India can allow themselves a little slack following this chastening defeat, a 2-2 series draw burgled at the last minute by an England side remoulded entirely from last summer’s rabble.
Few could have predicted the chain of events that would lead from Ravi Shastri’s book launch to here, but perhaps with Root and Bairstow playing like this we should have at least guessed that this is how the morning would play out.
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