It says everything about a packed schedule, and even more about the state of England’s Test pitches, that Ben Stokes and his team were lying low at their hotel in Kensington only 48 hours before the start of their biggest game since the 2023 Ashes.
There was no training, no team announcement, no press-conference mind games ahead of a match that could deliver the most impressive series win of the Bazball era.
Instead, the players were knackered, driven to exhaustion by administrators who have concertinaed the summer to keep August free for the Hundred, and by surfaces which have been ‘kryptonite’ to England’s wearyseamers, as the former Test star Steve Harmison put it following the draw in Manchester.
The irony as we await the toss at 10.30am on Thursday is that whoever wins it may feel obliged to bowl. You have to go back to April 2023, when Hampshire’s James Vince said ‘we’ll have a bat’, to find a red-ball captain at the Oval who bucked the trend. Since then, 20 matches — both county and Test — have come and gone, and everyone has fielded first.
With good reason: Surrey like a bit of grass on their pitches, a bit of pace and carry. It’s nine first-class games since the team batting first at the Oval finished victorious, and that was last summer when a powerful Surrey side beat Essex en route to a third successive Championship.
It should, then, be the kind of surface England have been craving all summer, having banged their heads against brick walls from Leeds to Birmingham and from Lord’s to Manchester. Yet a question remains: which of their seamers will be in any fit state to take advantage of a pitch that may finally help them?
Stokes prefers continuity of selection, but it is asking a lot of Jofra Archer to play three Tests in a row so soon into his comeback. Chris Woakes and Brydon Carse, meanwhile, were running on fumes during the last five sessions at Old Trafford, where 140 overs brought England just two wickets.
Had Joe Root not dropped Ravindra Jadeja shortly before lunch on the last day, they might have been able to rest their first-choice attack with the series already won. Instead, they must contemplate bringing in any or all of Gus Atkinson, Josh Tongue and, for only his second Test, Jamie Overton against an Indian team determined to leave with the 2–2 draw they believe their cricket has merited.
And their resolve will have stiffened after their ever-prickly coach Gautam Gambhir took offence at Surrey head groundsman Lee Fortis’s request to stay off the Oval square during training — the latest flashpoint.
The prospect of England fielding a second-string attack is not ideal for a team trying to tick off a 3-1 victory. Neither will it impress the fans who have ensured a five-day sellout in south London to watch the series finale between two teams who have fought like maniacs. India, too, may stick to their pre-series pledge of resting Jasprit Bumrah for two of the five matches, potentially robbing a must-win game of another star attraction.
This is not how a blue-riband Test match should be, yet the players are hardly at fault. Despite England’s repeated requests for pitches with pace and bounce, chief executives at the Test grounds prefer surfaces that guarantee at least four days of ticket revenue, plus income from merchandise, food and beer. As one member of the England set-up told Mail Sport: ‘I think they’ve made enough money out of us this series.’
Groundstaff are overworked by a crippling schedule, their job made harder by the driest summer in living memory. To make matters worse for the bowlers, the Dukes ball has been going unusually soft.
In all, England have bowled 5,366 balls. Only once before, in the West Indies in 1929-30, have they sent down more in four Tests, and those games were played to a finish — until the last match, in Jamaica, was abandoned as a draw after 10 days because Freddie Calthorpe’s England team had to catch the boat home.
If this five-game series had been given more room to breathe, so would the seamers. But the Hundred now has pride of place in August, and so the fifth Test must be over by the time the men and women of London Spirit and Oval Invincibles clash at Lord’s on Tuesday. Inevitably, bowlers on both sides have struggled.
When the pitches are green and the Tests over inside three days, this is less of a problem. When they are brown and dry, and tempers are flaring, and everything is repeatedly at stake in the final session, something has to give. This series deserves better than to hobble over the line.
