You expect tail-enders at bat to be entertaining; it's like the guys with big red noses in the circus, keeping you in splits in between the serious stuff.
India's tail has begun mixing enterprise with entertainment too often, lately, for it to be happenstance; today, it was all there -- enterprise, entertainment, initiative.
The statistics tell you one part of the story -- Kumble, Harbhajan, Sreeshanth and Munaf between them faced down one hall short of 24 overs and added 68 runs to the Indian total. Or, put another way, knocked off 68 runs their batsmen would otherwise have had to make in the second go-round.
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Each of those runs was thus worth gold twice over; the hidden value, beyond the obvious, lay in taking the momentum of the match away from England for the second successive session and getting some adrenalin going again for the home team.
Anil Kumble has rediscovered both his obduracy, and his touch with the bat; a couple of his square cuts here, read in tandem with some of his shots in other recent outings, made you wonder if he has been taking batting lessons from his illustrious state mate G R Vishwanath.
The surprise package though was Sreesanth -- very compact, very useful with the bat, with the ability to come into line even against the fast stuff with the new ball, equipped with shots on either side of the track and the nous to bide his time and pick the ball to go hard at.
Above all, guts -- Flintoff, clearly irritated with the resistance shown by the tail, clocked the tailender on the side of the head with a quick bouncer. Sreeshanth took the hit, walked away to leg, shook his head vigorously to clear it, seemed to tell his partner Kumble to stop fussing, went back to his crease and to the very next ball, came dancing down the wicket, making room to carve the bowler inside out over mid off for four. Long story short, by the time Sreesanth got done with him, Flintoff was running in with one slip, and plenty of cover in the outfield, and still being taken for runs 15 of them, off 14 balls faced from the England captain.
The 50-partnership (67 balls) was an association of equals -- senior partner Kumble contributed 26 off 38, and Sreesanth weighed in with 20 off 29.
The association was just beginning to shift from the embarrassing to the threatening when Monty Panesar took out Anil Kumble, aided by a bit of luck the ball drifted in to off, Kumble went for the sweep, the fuller length delivery beat the bat and hit the pad, but already seemed to be doing enough to slip past off stump. Darrell Hair thought otherwise, and Kumble walked back with a fighting 30 off 70 deliveries, having played his part in a 55 run stand at a healthy 3.83 runs per over.
Munaf Patel played one scorching straight drive off James Anderson, but the bowler nipped his resistance with a well-aimed yorker on the base of off stump to leave Sreesanth on an unbeaten 29/43, and end the Indian innings on 279 -- a lead, for England, of 121.
It was, for the second game running, a dramatic recovery from an impossible position; for the second game running, it owed entirely to the lower order, that dragged the team from 142/5, when Dravid was out. The 137 runs the lower six added is for obvious reasons important; the team could still find cause to bless the fact that they also consumed a solid 50 overs, just four less than the top five batsmen managed between them.
Dravid this time gave the new ball to Munaf Patel and the quick struck early. To Andrew Strauss, Patel went around the wicket (an interesting facet of his bowling, this -- he seems able to switch sides at will without any noticeable impact on pace and control; for him, unlike say for Pathan, Zaheer Khan et al, switching around is actually an attacking option), swung wide of the crease and angled one in to the footmarks outside the off stump.
The length was good enough to draw the batsman forward; the ball seamed off the deck, found the edge and Dhoni, diving forward headlong, grabbed it millimeters off the turf to have England 9/1.
Next up, Sreeshanth, who seemed to carry into his bowling the adrenalin that infused his batting. One ball opened Ian Bell up, beating him around off; the next one was pitched that inch further up to find the edge the previous delivery had missed, to give Dhoni a far simpler take (8/30; 21/2).
One ball later, Sreeshanth did it again -- produced an identical delivery that beat night watchman Shaul Udal, found the edge and went through to the keeper -- leaving Darrell Hair the only man motionless on the field.
Sreeshanth, at the close of day two when asked about dropped catches, said the attitude of the bowler needed to be, if I can do it once, I can do it again. Walking that talk, the young seam bowler in the last over of the day produced another beauty -- he got the ball to bend in, hit the deck, kick, move away; it flew off the thick edge of Udal's bat, and Yuvraj Singh at third slip dropped the easiest one the Indians have floored thus far.
The day closed with England 31/2, 152 ahead on the second innings; the batting side could have been worse plight had the night watchman been out on any of the two occasions.
I closed the second session report suggesting that all three results were still possible; I spent the first half of the final session responding to comments on the lines of 'What have you been smoking?'
The answer, then and now, is -- Dunhill filters, they may be bad for the lungs but they keep me awake and they have no hallucinogenic properties, and I still believe all three options are still open, and the game, after three days of hard fought cricket, is dead even.
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