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Big picture: India have the momentum after Edgbaston triumph

At Headingley, India lost the unlosable Test. At Edgbaston, they made spectacular amends, in circumstances that belied even their most optimistic pre-series hopes.

If there had been a quiet belief before the tour that Shubman Gill was too good to keep averaging below 30 in overseas Tests, then the captain’s match haul of 430 runs – second only to Graham Gooch in a famous forerunner of this latest Lord’s contest 35 years ago – was an insatiable response to his team’s hour of need.

And if India’s team selection – with their focus on batting depth in the lower-middle order – had implied a willingness to settle for a draw while their star strike bowler Jasprit Bumrah preserved his strength for the back end of the campaign, then no one told Akash Deep that he was intended as a conservative pick.

Akash Deep’s superb ten-wicket haul dripped with a new-ball threat of which Bumrah himself would have been proud, most particularly his candidate for ball of the series to Joe Root in the second innings (and no, it was not a back-foot no-ball – MCC has clarified the ruling).

With Mohammed Siraj stepping up as he has often done in Bumrah’s absence (his average in 15 Tests without Bumrah is almost eight points lower than when he plays second fiddle), India’s seamers harnessed an especially truculent Dukes ball and made sure that barely an over went to waste while it was at its shiniest and newest. England’s startling tally of six ducks in the first innings confirmed the extent to which England were caught cold by fast bowling of the highest class.

Not that England will be unduly rattled by the extent of this setback. It’s easy to mock their determination to take on any given run-chase, particularly when two of their last four fourth innings have resulted in defeats by 423 runs against New Zealand in Hamilton in December, and now by 336 runs at Edgbaston.

But six 250-plus chases in the Bazball era, with India on the receiving end of each of their two highest in history, confirms the extent of England’s divorce from precedent. Where once there might have been shame at such a monumental thumping in a Test match, now there’s merely a shrug, and a determination to do the same again next time, only better.

Whether India allow England to improve on that showing, however, is a different matter. Gill’s relentless run-making at Edgbaston reflected his determination not to be drawn into playing his opponents’ game – as had arguably been the case when he holed out for 147 to trigger the dramatic collapse that allowed England back into that first Test. In the second, fatigue eventually got the better of him on 269 but, until that point, he had been in control of 93% of his shots across 386 balls, a remarkable figure that confirmed his refusal to give any suckers an even break.

Perhaps the return of Jofra Archer will give Gill the hurry-up that was so lacking at Edgbaston. The mind’s eye is sure to drift back to Archer’s stunning debut on this ground six years ago, when he felled Steven Smith in the midst of a witheringly quick spell in the 2019 Ashes.

The reality, however, might be subtly different. At the age of 30 and with a litany of injuries now hopefully behind him, Archer would be within his rights to pitch himself as a different type of bowler for this second coming: a scalpel rather than the sledgehammer that Brydon Carse and Josh Tongue set out to be, with varying degrees of success, across the first two matches.

Either way, it promises to be the grandest of events. Last month, the most illustrious stage in the game proved utterly pivotal to the success of the World Test Championship (WTC) final. Now, Lord’s plays host to the modern game’s actual overlords, at the most perfect juncture of a compelling five-Test series. Neither team seems minded to take a backward step, but to judge by the battles that have gone before, someone will have been forced to blink by the time these five days are done.

Form guide

England LWWLW (last five Tests, most recent first)
India WLLLD

In the spotlight: Jofra Archer and Jasprit Bumrah

There’s no denying the buzz of anticipation that Jofra Archer’s return to Test cricket has created. There aren’t many more box-office cricketers in England’s ranks, especially given his exploits here at Lord’s in 2019. To say a fair bit of water has flowed under the bridge since then is a gross understatement, but despite his well-documented elbow and back issues, Archer has now been injury-free for the best part of two years.

That said, his robustness hasn’t been tested to the fullest extent in white-ball cricket. He bowled just 18 overs on his comeback for Sussex last month, on an admittedly placid deck at Chester-le-Street, but that was sufficient for England to fast-track him back into the big time.

When it comes to box-office, even Archer has to cede status to the undisputed grandee of contemporary seam bowling. Every ball that Jasprit Bumrah bowled in the first Test at Headingley felt like a wicket about to happen – and so it proved in the first innings, when he struck in each of his first three spells, and would surely have powered India into an indomitable position had it not been for his costly overstep with Harry Brook on 0.

Even when his threat was negated in England’s second innings, it first required an outbreak of rare deference from Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett to set the course for their 371-run chase. He’ll be rested and raring to go at Lord’s, with a place on that dressing-room honours board very much in his sights.

Team news: Will India persist with Nair at No. 3?

True to form, England confirmed their XI well before the match, with Archer returning to the fray. He is the only change from the team that lost at Edgbaston, with Tongue – the series-leading wicket-taker with 11 at 33.63 – making way after his heavy workload in the first two Tests.

England: 1 Zak Crawley, 2 Ben Duckett, 3 Ollie Pope, 4 Joe Root, 5 Harry Brook, 6 Ben Stokes (capt), 7 Jamie Smith (wk), 8 Chris Woakes, 9 Brydon Carse, 10 Jofra Archer, 11 Shoaib Bashir

Bumrah’s absence did not derail India’s ambitions at Edgbaston – far from it – but his return after a fortnight’s rest could turbo-charge their bid to move 2-1 up, in a series in which they’ve been on top for at least seven days out of ten. He is expected to slot back in in place of Prasidh Krishna, whose economy rate took a battering in the first two games.

With Akash Deep and Siraj sharing 17 wickets at Edgbaston, that seam unit suddenly looks potent in the extreme. Which is all the more reason why India will likely resist the temptation to include the wristspinner Kuldeep Yadav. Washington Sundar was the safer option and justified his pick with a key 42 from No. 8 in the first innings.

India (probable): 1 Yashasvi Jaiswal, 2 KL Rahul, 3 Karun Nair, 4 Shubman Gill (capt), 5 Rishabh Pant (wk), 6 Nitish Kumar Reddy, 7 Ravindra Jadeja, 8 Washington Sundar, 9 Jasprit Bumrah, 10 Akash Deep, 11 Mohammed Siraj

Pitch and conditions: Look up, not down

Lord’s, as the cliché goes, is a “look up, not down” venue, where the overhead conditions play a bigger role in the pitch’s behaviour than the surface itself. This notion was borne out at the WTC final last month, when the sun broke through for the final day and a bit, and a pitch on which both sides had struggled became a road.

That precedent is unlikely to discourage England from their preferred “we’ll have a chase” mentality, for all that Stokes insists his team are not webbed to the notion. A clear and dry forecast will be a factor, and so too a surface that still had a covering of live grass on the eve of the match and might offer some assistance on the first morning.

Stats and trivia: Root nears 3000

• Archer is set to play his 14th Test, and his first since the tour of India in February 2021, 1595 days ago. In that period, he has missed 53 Tests across 18 series, home and away.

• Gill has a current series tally of 585 runs at 146.25, with three hundreds and a best of 269. Among the many records he could challenge in the remaining three Tests, Gill needs just 18 more to pass Rahul Dravid’s haul of 602 in 2002, the most by an India batter in England.

• Joe Root needs 45 runs to become the first batter to score 3000 against India in Test cricket.

• Chris Woakes has taken 32 wickets at 12.90 in seven Tests at Lord’s, including three five-wicket hauls. He has also scored 340 runs at 42.50, including his only Test century … against India in 2018.

• India have won just three of their previous 19 Tests at Lord’s (against England’s 12 wins). However, two of those have come in their last three visits, in 2014 and in 2021, when Siraj claimed eight wickets in the match after KL Rahul’s match-defining hundred.

Quotes

“It’s great for English fans, but also for Jof. It’s been a long time coming for him. He can be pretty proud of himself that he’s managed to get himself back here after two pretty big injury scares.”
Ben Stokes welcomes Jofra Archer back to the Test team after his four years on the sidelines

“Everything. How accurate he is, the way his mind works. It is just amazing. It is more difficult for a wicketkeeper than for a batsman.”
Rishabh Pant is in awe of Bumrah, as he prepares to return for the Lord’s Test