Having England's batsmen in a spin

Coming into the final day, England would have fancied their chances of scoring the 174 more runs they needed for victory, but Danish Kaneria turned it around with an outstanding spell of bowling which, in the end, proved decisive.

The fifth-day pitch had a role to play, but Kaneria helped his cause with his superb control over both line and length. Legspinners generally tend to bowl a loose ball an over, but Kaneria, like Shane Warne - who England faced plenty of during the Ashes - was stingy with four-balls. In the entire match, he only dragged down seven deliveries short of a length. When he did err in length, he tended to pitch it too full rather than too short, which was a much better option on a slow pitch.

The one batsman in the match who dominated Kaneria was Marcus Trescothick - not only did he score 64 from 74 balls against Kaneria in the first innings, a scoring rate of more than five an over - he also had an in-control factor of 83% (that's the percentage of deliveries middled, left alone, or padded up to). Unfortunately for England, he was already back in the hutch by the time Kaneria came on to bowl in the second innings.

The graphic below shows how much more effective Kaneria was in the second innings than in the first - he doubled his potentially wicket-taking deliveries against England's top seven batsmen from 20% to 40%. With Shoaib Akhtar spewing fire from the other end, the combination turned out to be too much for England's batsmen.