Yashasvi Jaiswal stared at a zigzagging crack. From here the ball had shot into the under-side of his bat and crashed onto the stumps.
A few metres away, his terminator Shoaib Bashir could not hold his joy back. He roared and leapt into the embrace of his joyful colleagues. Bashir had dismissed the prickliest thorn in his country’s flesh in this series, Jaiswal.
The Indian opener was his fourth victim of the afternoon, but the most precious in his scalp-list.
Either side of his resistance, India would wilt, and eventually settle for 219/7, 134 runs adrift of England’s total at stumps on Day Two.
He has already pounded and grounded them for 618 runs and racked up a pair of double hundreds. Here, he, like in Visakhapatnam and Ranchi, seemed to hurt them and drag India out of the mess. And then struck Bashir, the twenty-year-old parachuted to Test cricket just because Ben Stokes happened to watch a clip of Bashir bowling to Alastair Cook on Twitter two months ago.