The Nagpur slab of compacted disappointment

Virat Kohli and Ian Bell decide the best way to deal with the Nagpur pitch is to drive a stake through its heart
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England wrapped up a deserved series win in Nagpur in what was effectively reduced to a three-Test series by an abomination of a pitch that produced a match of unremitting, merciless tedium. It reached even that level of intrigue only thanks to some delusional umpiring and a few careless pieces of batting that can be safely attributed to the players temporarily having the will to live sucked from their souls by a surface with all the vitality of a fossilised brick, 22 yards of cricketing mausoleum upon which the groundsman should have daubed the words, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”, or, at the very least, “I Hate Cricket”. Why he did not do so remains a mystery that may never be adequately explained.

It would have taken a superhuman effort of sustained incompetence for either side to lose this match. Neither side obliged, and, amidst one of the most anticlimactic conclusions to a sporting event imaginable, England gained significant consolation at the end of a disappointing year.

Alastair Cook’s captaincy tenure has thus begun with an impressive individual and collective triumph. England recovered from a woeful start, and ruthlessly exposed and exploited the seismic faultlines in the Indian team that were apparent in their humiliations in England and Australia last year, and could not be camouflaged by home advantage. Cook’s personal performance was monumental. His century in defeat in the first Test turned the momentum of the series, his hundreds in the second and third Tests ground down and dispirited an increasingly pallid opposition. The skill, craft and persistence of Panesar, Swann and Anderson, and the Mumbai magic of Pietersen, overwhelmed the home team, whose faint hopes of rescuing a drawn series were scuppered by that Nagpur slab of compacted disappointment, which offered nothing to bowlers, batsmen, spectators, commentators, sponsors, men, women, children, the elderly, the living, the dead, or anyone with belief in the existence of a benevolent god.

It was one of the worst Test matches of recent vintage. The match run rate was 2.27 per over, the second slowest of the 525 Test matches played since April 2001.

Only a late flurry of runs, when even the minimal pressure India had been able to impose had long since dissipated in the inevitability of a draw, raised it past the 2.25 per over of the Bangladesh v New Zealand Test in Chittagong in 2008-09, a game which had the decency to provide 37 wickets and a tight, low-scoring contest that ended with the Kiwis chasing down 317 to win by three wickets. The overall run rate in those 525 Tests is 3.26.

Bowlers struck on average once every 120 balls, the 19th worst match strike-rate of the 585 Tests since January 2000 which have lasted for at least 90 overs. The average strike rate in all Tests in that time is a wicket every 66 balls. So in the average recent Test, runs are scored almost 50% more quickly, and wickets taken almost twice as often, as happened in Nagpur.

The interminable drudgery was not helped by a soporific over-rate, plodding along at around the mandatory 15 over per hour despite fewer than a quarter of the overs being bowled by pacemen, or the innumerable needless interruptions that have been allowed to proliferate, or by the fact that England had no need to take the initiative, and India no apparent urge or ability to do so. Their batting at the start of day four was bafflingly pointless. And they then helped Cook set what must surely be yet another record – the first batsman in cricket history to have three men defending the legside boundary after scoring 12 off 90 balls.