Padikkal and Sarfaraz, opposites in stature and style, reduce test to no-contest

Test matches can change quickly. They can change dramatically in the space of eight balls.

In eight balls, you can go from having two centurions at the crease to having a debutant batting on 4 and a guy who made his debut three weeks ago batting on 0. You may have taken a first-innings lead, but eight balls can transform your visions of how far you can stretch it.

A ball change could be involved in this eight-ball transformation. A ball that did nothing could have given way to a ball that's doing all kinds of things. Like Ben Stokes bowling his first ball in eight months of Test cricket and straightening it past Rohit Sharma's outside edge to hit off stump. Like James Anderson producing a gorgeous nip-backer out of nowhere to dismiss Shubman Gill for the sixth time in Test cricket.

Devdutt Padikkal and Sarfaraz Khan found themselves in this kind of changed, charged Test-match situation on Friday. As they have done multiple times over the last few weeks, England's bowling attack had found a way to stay in a Test match despite spending the preceding two sessions looking entirely inadequate for the conditions.

Once again, they were putting India's most inexperienced batting line-up in recent memory to considerable test.

By the time they had both returned to the warmth of India's dressing room with 56 and 65 to their respective names, Sarfaraz and Padikkal had passed the test so comfortably that it no longer looked like much of a test at all. They had quelled any real threat of an England comeback, and over the course of their 97-run partnership had returned England's attack to the state of seeming inadequacy.

Along the way, they had revealed facets of their game that most fans wouldn't have seen before.

Padikkal could be the tallest specialist batter to play for India, and Sarfaraz is among the shortest. Usually, this sort of odd batting couple tends to present bowling attacks a problem of contrasts: typically, a tall front-foot player who loves driving in the V and a short back-foot player who loves cutting and pulling. Think Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett, or Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer.

This pair was different. Sarfaraz, true to type, hangs back to most lengths from the fast bowlers. But so does Padikkal, though he isn't necessarily a back-foot player. He is, instead, the kind of tall, languid left-hander who doesn't move his feet all that much but is prepared to trust his timing and drive on the up, peppering the cover point region.

England fully challenged these techniques when these two were new to the crease. Stokes bowled to Sarfaraz with a short mid-on placed next to the pitch, hoping for a push down the ground played with head not quite on top of the ball. He got his wish, too, but the ball went straight back towards the bowler rather than the leg-side catcher, presenting a low, tumbling half-chance - quarter-chance, really - that Stokes couldn't cling onto in his follow-through. Then the no-ball siren blared, meaning his efforts would have counted for nothing if he'd managed to complete the catch.

Anderson was hoping for a similar error from Padikkal, with two catchers at short point and short cover point waiting for the uppish, sliced drive played with weight not fully forward. This didn't quite come about, but it so nearly could have. Padikkal edged Anderson wide of slip once - he also did this against Stokes to bring up his first runs in Test cricket - and drove successfully on the up a couple of times, and also hit a drive in the air but into the gap between cover point and extra cover.

Very few significant partnerships in Test cricket come about without the batters enjoying a bit of luck, and this was no different. By the time Anderson and Stokes were done with their spells, Padikkal was batting on 30 off 32 balls and Sarfaraz on 7 off 20.

The introduction of spin reversed this scoring pattern. Padikkal, whose height and reach and left-handedness should theoretically make him a menace against left-arm spin, went into a shell against Tom Hartley, revealing an unusually crease-bound defensive method. Sarfaraz, meanwhile, began to bring out his attacking game: a short ball walloped to the midwicket boundary, a good-length ball slog-swept daringly in the same region, over a leaping fielder placed two-thirds of the way to the boundary.

There was still pace to deal with, though, the paciest of England's pace options in Mark Wood. A man who has a bit of a history with Sarfaraz.

During last year's IPL, a Wood bouncer had left Sarfaraz looking extremely awkward. He had looked to lean back and ramp it over slip, but the ball had jagged in off the surface and followed him, leaving him on the floor as he sent the ball ballooning into the hands of fine leg.

Batters frequently end up in knots when they try and fail to manufacture boundaries in T20s, and no batter could have known that this ball would deviate quite so much. It wasn't the kind of dismissal that said anything meaningful about Sarfaraz's overall game against the short ball, but he already had a reputation - whether deserved or not - and this added to it.

By the time Sarfaraz made his Test debut in Rajkot, having had to prove himself over 45 first-class games despite averaging close to 70, it was widely assumed that a weakness against the short ball had held back his selection. The first three balls he faced in Test cricket were, appropriately enough, short from Wood. He played them out defensively, and dealt similarly with Wood's next over of predominantly short bowling. Thereafter, he got stuck into England's spinners, and motored to a dazzling debut half-century.

It had only been a teaser. Now, three weeks on, Wood vs Sarfaraz had come to Dharamsala. Seven balls went by without incident. Then came the over with the two boundaries off Hartley. It seemed to flick a switch in Sarfaraz.

Wood ran in again, and went full. Sarfaraz, not known for his power game in the V, took a small step forward and smacked him back over his head, with the kind of short-arm, straight-bat punch that another little man from Mumbai made famous.

One incident-free ball later, Wood went short. Sarfaraz leaned back, and it seemed initially that he was swaying out of line. But then, with a movement both rapid and stealthy, he let the ball run off the face of his bat. The ramp that he had failed to execute last year in the IPL, nailed in magnificent style in a Test match.

Wood is genuinely rapid and tries extremely hard, but there are times in Test cricket when his bowling appears to lack that extra ingredient that could make him scarily fast in the manner of a Shoaib Akhtar. Earlier in the day, for instance, he had bowled with a packed leg-side field and no one in front of square on the off side, and Rohit Sharma had exposed all his stumps and slapped him through mid-off. Sometimes, Wood's efforts, no matter how quick he's bowling, seem those of an honest trier rather than an elite Test-match quick.

The next instalment of Wood vs Sarfaraz gave the same impression. He tried going full again, and Sarfaraz clipped him neatly past a diving square leg. And then he tried going short again.

This time the riposte was a ferocious, swivelling hook into the stands beyond the square-leg boundary.

It's one thing for Rohit to put Wood to the sword. It's another for a recent debutant with questions over his short-ball skills to do so.

No such questions have been asked about Sarfaraz's game against spin, and he continued to show why. He's the most natural sweeper India may have ever produced, and uses every inch of his reach in a way that the far taller Padikkal does not. Two sweeps off Shoaib Bashir, one along the ground and one in the air, both bisecting deep-backward square leg and deep midwicket, took Sarfaraz past fifty. From 9 off 30 balls, he had sped to 50 off 55.

Sarfaraz could give us many years of this sort of acceleration, but we'll have to be prepared for as many years of frustrating dismissals. First ball after tea, he attempted a cute late cut off Bashir that was loaded with risk, with a slip in place, and ended up guiding the ball straight to the man.

He'd been run out in gutting fashion in sight of a debut hundred in Rajkot. Now it felt like he'd thrown away another chance, but if we're complaining about a batter who's scored three fifties in his first five Test innings, it shows the expectations he's built with his first-class record.

Padikkal's first-class record isn't flash: he averaged 44.54 before this match. But he's turned a corner as a red-ball player over this 2023-24 season. He came into it with an average of 36.25, and proceeded to make his case for Test selection with four hundreds in ten innings for Karnataka and India A, converting two of them into 150-plus scores.

He's clearly found an understanding of his game, what its limits are and how best to harness its strengths. It was showing here too, in his first Test innings, when he was going at a control percentage of over 90 despite camping so much in the crease against both pace and spin.

And he continued to demonstrate how sweetly he can time the ball, caressing Anderson through the covers once again when he returned shortly before tea, and launching Bashir down the ground for an effortless straight six soon after the break. There wouldn't be a debut hundred, though, as Bashir turned a quick offbreak past his crease-bound defence on 65.

By then, India were past 400, and 185 ahead of England.

If you had been told before this series began that two India batters would put on 97 for the fourth wicket in the fifth Test in Dharamsala, there's no way you would have guessed which two batters they would be. It's a sign of the depth of India's batting resources that a series of improbable events threw Padikkal and Sarfaraz into this situation and they came through it and made it look almost routine.