The curious case of Dravid's crawl

At the start of play on the fourth day, India were huge favourites to wrap up a 2-0 series win. They could still get there, but England have given themselves a much better chance of saving the Test - and keeping India from joining them at No.2 spot in the ICC rankings - after an excellent day with both ball and bat.

Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook did a superb job of seeing off 20 overs in the evening, but the day was set up by England's performance in the field, when they allowed India to score at only 3.10 runs per over. Much of that run-rate was due to a rather inexplicable innings from the captain of the team trying to force a win. Rahul Dravid had some justification in starting his innings slowly after India lost three early wickets, but then he got into a rut and forgot his attacking options. By the time he was put out of his misery by Paul Collingwood, Dravid had scored 12 from 96, including a 35-ball passage - from the 18th to the 52nd ball - when he didn't score a single run. Among innings in which he has faced at least 50 deliveries, this was his third-slowest. All have come against England, with the other two coming within a week of each other, during England's tour of India in 2001-02.

Dravid's strike rate of 12.50 doesn't rank anywhere near the slowest all-time innings, though. The table below lists the slowest innings - lasting at least 75 balls - by batsmen in the top seven. The name on top of the list isn't one you would normally associate with slow scoring - Abdul Razzaq made an unbeaten 4 off 76 balls against Australia at Melbourne in 2004-05. Not very far down the list is another name which you'd think doesn't belong here - Ian Botham, when he needed 88 balls to score 6 against Australia in 1978-79.

Dravid's knock was one of the slowest 12s in Test cricket, though. Only three times has a 12 needed more deliveries: Sri Lanka's Dulip Liyanage scored one off 101 deliveries against India at Lucknow in 1994, while John Edrich and Mark Taylor both got theirs off 98 deliveries.

Even as Dravid was struggling to get the ball off the square, though, his batting partner played quite an exquisite knock. Sourav Ganguly stroked some superb boundaries on the way to a 68-ball 57; only four times has he scored a 50-plus score at a faster pace.

England have put themselves in a position to save the Test, but they still have some way to go: only three teams have ever batted more than 110 overs in the fourth innings of a Test at The Oval. India hold the record - they batted for more than 150 overs in that famous Test in 1979. England's best is 105.1 overs, which wasn't enough to stop them going down by 158 runs against West Indies in 1973.