Stop the press. Yashasvi Jaiswal has a weakness, y'all. It's the filthy short and wide ball.
Bazballing Ben Stokes is a genius. You won't get it.
In his short but illustrious career, Jaiswal has tried to cut fast bowlers 94 times. He has mis-hit or completely missed 42 of those. Since Jaiswal's debut, 12 batters have attempted cutting fast bowlers 50 or more times. Nobody's control percentage is worse than Jaiswal's.
Jaiswal has just been lucky to have got out only twice when cutting a fast bowler. Until today. And Stokes should know. Since 2020, he has played 61 false shots on the cut to the fast bowler and has got out only once. So let it be said that we are not accusing England of following data. This is their feel for the game. From personal experience. You study data. They make data. You won't get it.
How long can Jaiswal be lucky, eh? He thinks he can keep throwing the kitchen sink at it in the false belief that there is no way an edge off such hard hits is going to go to hand. He doesn't know the power of stringing together good balls. In this series alone, fast bowlers have made Jaiswal cut 24 times. That edge was the result you saw, the previous 23 were the hard work you didn't.
Not to forget the bluff. After any century with just ten runs on the on side, you will naturally expect the bowlers to bowl straight and make you play into the leg side. Jaiswal would have spent hours in the nets working on his leg-side game. Only to be tested on his real weakness: the short and wide delivery.
Wash your mouth with soap already if you think you are going to tell me Shoaib Bashir gets only boundary catches as dismissals. There is word going around India are not ruthless enough. In Hyderabad, it is said, all of the top-five India batters got out in non-traditional ways, giving up a chance of batting England out of the game.
Tradition is not what you think tradition is. Tradition is what they do out in the middle. Once you do it long enough, it becomes tradition. Do you think Stokes has forgotten Hyderabad? No amount of data can give you this instinctive feel for the game.
"Had those decisions gone our way, the day would have looked completely different," Chris Woakes says
Boundary riders are catching fielders. Especially if they are right behind the umpire or another fielder where the human in the foreground can hide the one behind him. How many times is Rishabh Pant supposed to keep tabs on field changes and funky fielders? There was a time when Stokes was moving them around every ball. Like chess pieces. Without apparent rhyme or reason to the undiscerning eye. His endgame was overs away. When he settled on the long-on exactly behind the mid-on, and retained him for more than one ball.
Pant had so many reasons to not be aware of the deep fielder. He could have assumed Stokes is so fickle he would have moved him by now. He could have not seen him. The fielder might have moved so wide that he would have got out of his eyeline.
And then Bashir bowled the sucker ball. Stokes even bowled Bashir with the wind so this hit could get caught in the wind. It is not called lucky boundary catches; it is called bowling to your field, which the batter possibly doesn't even know.
By now India should be saying, "How do we even compete with these guys?"