Kolkata: Harry Brook led a charmed life at Headingley, till he ran out of luck. There is no greater agony than to be dismissed one run short of a hundred at a ground one has grown up playing cricket. But it’s also true Brook had no business lasting as long as he did. India’s woeful catching gave him two lives, at two very curious junctures of the day. Both came behind the wicket, by the wicketkeeper and then gully, positions you are probability-wise more assured of these catches being taken. This, however, was also a strange day where easy catches were dropped and stupendous catches manufactured. But that doesn’t lessen the damage by any extent.
At the end of the Test, when every hour’s play is expected to be audited and dissected, the dropped catches will hurt most. Because if there was ever a day worse than others to drop catches it was Sunday at Leeds, in the first of a five-match Test series, having got a first-innings total big enough to make England sweat. Both chances off Brook should have been held, both critically spaced out in the context of England’s first-innings chase.
The first came in the 72nd over, off Ravindra Jadeja’s bowling. It was a flighted delivery that held its line, and Brook, trying to defend off his front foot, ended up edging it. The bounce was discerning but these are catches that must be taken at this level. Hard and high hands from Pant meant Brook was let off. Lesson 101 of keeping wicket to spinners is to rise as late as possible so that the eye level moves with that of the ball. This being Jadeja, who tends to bowl quicker through the air when the ball isn’t gripping as well as in India, the timing of the wicketkeeper’s rise becomes doubly important. Pant, never quite the stickler for the basics, ended up being horribly placed for the edge.
Brook was on 46 then. By the time he was dropped again, Brook was on 80. In between, he had added 73 runs with Jamie Smith, blunted out Jasprit Bumrah and gone after Mohammed Siraj successfully to prompt quick bowling changes. Bumrah was summoned, and once again he was hitting the right lengths. Sensing that Brook was trying to hang back in his crease, Bumrah tried a short of length delivery and almost out of instinct Brook just hung his bat out at it. It flew off the bat but Jaiswal dropped the catch at gully, bringing the grand total of dropped catches off Bumrah to four. And this was probably the easiest, given the ball was travelling at shoulder height.
Those two lives essentially helped Brook score 53 more runs and take England to 398/7 from 300/5. Who knows what kind of lead India would have won had Brook been caught by Pant? Only twice did the Indian fielding look smart — when Brook was finally caught at deep backward square leg, and when Smith was caught by Sai Sudharsan through a lovely combination catch. That catch was all Jadeja though, and a nice shakeup from the shock of seeing him grassing Ben Duckett at backward point on Sunday. To throw the ball back to Sudharsan while going over the boundary is something Jadeja can do in his sleep, and so it would be unfair to probably judge everyone by his standard.
In total, four catches went down at the slip, Jaiswal being at the end of two of them involving Pope and Brook. Chances of edges to the slip cordon increase at venues where the ball is swinging with a fair degree of carry. Concentrating on slip catching is also relatively easier overseas since the decibel level is almost always less than in India. Which should make it all the more difficult for India to live with the fact that both Pope and Brook — centurion and near-centurion in England’s innings — reached there partly because of the lives given to them.