India vs England: Rahul Dravid, it’s not the pitch, it’s the batting

The next time Rahul Dravid walks to the pitch for one of his inspections before and during the game, the curator might well jibe, ‘Problem idhar nahi, dressing room mey hai’ (there isn’t a problem here, it’s in the dressing room).

In a remarkable first hour of play, on a pitch with no devils, India contrived to lose three quick wickets after winning the toss. It could well have been four before the total reached 50, and who knows how many more after that but Joe Root dropped an offering from Rohit Sharma, who went on to score a half-century.

The dismissals could be seen through the prism of Rohit’s reactions. At one point when Rajat Patidar fell, Rohit dropped his bat to the ground, turned square and stared at the big screen to see if it revealed something about the pitch that he hadn’t seen in the real world. It didn’t.

The ball from left-arm spinner Tom Hartley turned a bit but Patidar had dragged himself into a bubble of distress. He had initially shaped to get forward, then shaped to cut – in the end, he just offered a weird tap at it without pulling out of the shot in time and the ball ballooned ever so slowly to short cover, who would have been placed there for the uppish drive and not this.