A day that’s been all Yashasvi Jaiswal without quite being all India. Jaiswal batted through the 90 overs, showing a precocious variety of Test-match gears to finish unbeaten on 179, his second Test hundred and his second big hundred too: his previous best was a lovely, unhurried 171 on debut in Dominica.
While Jaiswal spent the day making the pitch his home, though, he saw six wickets fall at the other end, all to scores between 14 and 34. India will be particularly disgruntled with how they lost wickets No. 5 and 6, Axar Patel and KS Bharat caught at backward point while failing to keep square cuts down.
“I was just batting session by session, and made sure that if they were bowling well I play out that spell,” Jaiswal says. “That’s it.”
He makes it sound simple, and he made it look simple too, but it surely cannot have been all that simple.
England won’t be displeased with how their day went. Far from it. Conditions so far have been pretty good to bat in, even if there’s been a little bit of bounce for the spinners to work with and some reverse as well, but they haven’t let India press home the advantage of batting first here. James Anderson, ageless James Anderson, played a big role in keeping India honest, dismissing Shubman Gill for the fifth time in Tests while going at just 1.76 across 17 overs.