Bowlers win Test matches - the old truth that's still true in cricket's brave new world

Sometimes, a series will throw up the oddest of numbers. Take this one, from India's just-completed 4-1 win over England. Over ten innings in this series, Ben Stokes faced 367 balls. Over six innings, Kuldeep Yadav faced 362.

Sometimes these numbers are random and meaningless, products of the high-speed blender of outcomes over small sample sizes. And even if there is meaning to be found, it may not be particularly deep. Sometimes a gun player goes through a bad patch and a lower-order batter ends up being unusually hard to dismiss.

Sometimes, though, a stat like this makes you pause and wonder. Would Stokes have endured less of a struggle if he hadn't had to face so much of Kuldeep, and would Kuldeep have found survival a lot more difficult had Stokes' knee allowed him to bowl more than just one spell in the entire series?

The question isn't so much about Stokes or Kuldeep, individually, as it is about the composition of the two bowling attacks. India played five proper bowlers in each of the five Tests, while England made do with just four, with Joe Root taking on an unusually high workload for a part-time spinner.

Root, in fact, ended up bowling more overs than James Anderson, while Tom Hartley and Shoaib Bashir, who made their debuts during this series, bowled more overs than anyone else on either side.

England's management of their bowling resources, in the end, showed the classic signs of an undermanned attack ill-equipped to the conditions: inexperienced spinners overbowled, an experienced fast bowler restricted to an oxymoronic bit-part starring role. Anderson looked in excellent rhythm whenever he bowled, always accurate, always buzzing in the mid-130s (kph) range, and threatened to take wickets whenever conditions gave him a window of help. But he was England's fifth-most-used bowler, behind Root and three spinners, who came into the series with one previous Test cap between them.

In effect, the bulk of the overs India faced through the series were bowled by inexperienced or non-regular spinners, who often also happened to be tiring.

Bashir bowled a 31-over spell in Ranchi - Kuldeep's dogged, match-turning 28 must have owed something to coming in during its latter stages - and he sent down 46.1 overs during India's only innings in Dharamsala. He did this despite starting the match with a stomach bug, and Jeetan Patel, England's spin-bowling coach, put a positive spin on it at the end of day two.

"Look, it's a hell of an effort," Patel said. "He was ill the day before the game. He wasn't well yesterday. And he's still a little bit iffy today, but to then go bang out 45 [44] overs and nearly knock off a five-for … you could say he deserves it, but no one deserves anything in this game.

"It's one of those things, he's put in a hell of a shift for us."

It was a hell of a shift, but it begged the question: if England were putting their inexperienced spinners through this sort of thing in match after match, they must have surely thought, at some point, of playing a fifth bowler?

Stokes, in his post-match press conference, was tetchy when he was asked this. "Hindsight," he said, "never loses."

Then he was pressed again on whether England had debated playing the extra bowler at any point during the series. "No," he said. "Again, those types of questions will always be asked after the fact. I don't deal in hindsight, sorry."

Ignoring the fact that Stokes did deal in hindsight for much of the rest of his press conference, let's move on, and talk about India.

For all of England's structural issues with the ball, they put India under pressure on numerous occasions, and even won a Test match - the first one, in Hyderabad.

Then, 1-0 down leading into the second Test in Visakhapatnam, India lost the services of KL Rahul, their most experienced specialist middle-order batter, and gun allrounder Ravindra Jadeja. These two had also made their top two scores in Hyderabad.

It left India with a potentially tricky choice: replace Jadeja with a like-for-like of sorts in Washington Sundar, who would give them comparable batting ability to Jadeja but not his skill or stamina with the ball, and Kuldeep, a proper bowler.

With the series wrapped up, and with Kuldeep having been one of its star performers, the choice looks obvious in hindsight. But it wasn't at the time, especially given the absence of so many experienced batters - apart from Rahul and Jadeja, India were without Virat Kohli, who missed the entire series for personal reasons.

"I think we've always wanted to ensure that we've got the best resources to be able to take 20 wickets," India coach Rahul Dravid said at the end of the Dharamsala Test. "I think that's been the bottomline of what me and Rohit [Sharma] have always spoken about. I think that's what wins you Test matches - being able to take 20 wickets quickly, as quickly as possible. That's something that we've always been clear about.

"The safer option would have been probably to strengthen the batting a little bit there. When I watched Axar Patel walk out at No. 6 [in Visakhapatnam], I remember looking at Vikram [Rathour, batting coach] and thinking, geez man, VVS Laxman used to walk out in that position (laughs). I mean, with due respect to Axar - he's a lovely guy, lovely player.

"But it was the braver option [to pick Kuldeep] and yes, we had to take a call there, and I'm really glad we were brave. We went with the braver option when we decided to back the fact that we knew we needed 20 wickets to win the series, and trust our batsmen to do the job when required, and I think that's paid off."

The Laxman reference was interesting, because Laxman missed out on a couple of Test matches when Dravid went with a five-bowler combination as India captain. That thinking was fresh at the time, and controversial too, and didn't really persist beyond Dravid's relatively brief captaincy stint. MS Dhoni played five bowlers on a few occasions, and Kohli a lot more often, but it took until India began to trust Jadeja to bat at No. 6 or 7 in all conditions for it to become a norm - the decisive shift perhaps came with the 2020 Boxing Day Test in Melbourne, when Ajinkya Rahane led in the absence of Kohli.

By the time India had to choose between Washington and Kuldeep, the precedent had long been established. They took the braver option, but it was so ingrained in their thinking that it may not have felt especially brave.

That word, brave, has often been used in reference to England's batting approach under Stokes and Brendon McCullum, and it's not misplaced. You need to be brave to back yourself to play attacking shots and look to hit good bowlers off their lengths, knowing the level of risk you're taking, knowing that there's even more of a chance than usual of a low score next to your name. You have to be brave to bat like this even if your team has backed you and told you they will keep backing you even if it doesn't come off.

There's a team element to it too: if a line-up of gifted attacking batters who have worked extremely hard on their attacking game commits to this philosophy fully, it only takes two or three of them coming off for an innings to take off. Playing like this, perhaps, requires a certain amount of batting depth too - as is evident in white-ball cricket. It's perhaps why England did not pick a fifth bowler at any point.

But the trade-off is immense. It can stretch your bowling attack to its limit. And when you come up against an attack as good as India's, you can end up with a complete mismatch. You can end up with one team taking all 100 available wickets in a series, and the other taking just 79.

Whatever approach batting sides may take, the fundamental truth of Test cricket doesn't change. Bowlers win matches and series.

The moment that ended this series, India's 100th wicket, could not have been more appropriate: Root c Jasprit Bumrah b Kuldeep. England's best batter, turned into a makeshift allrounder, caught by the series' best fast bowler by far, off the bowling of its most pivotal selection.