Dravid sets out to build monument to India's three graces

When India's captain Rahul Dravid finally allowed England a glimpse at the mountain peak target of 500 runs he had fashioned for them with considerable Oriental subtlety, if not befuddling obscurity, the crowd remembered they were in a cricket ground of some significance. The Mexican wave stopped promptly. Ironic cheers for Indian runs ceased.

Though it is true that scoring 12 runs in 140 minutes was not exactly a major contribution to the Twenty20 culture, Dravid, known affectionately in his own land as "The Wall", no doubt had reason enough to see himself as something other than a Sunday afternoon entertainer.

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Like his brilliant contemporaries Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly, Dravid was not playing for fun here – no more than he was at Trent Bridge two weeks ago when he and his team gave England a systematic re-education in the realities of grown-up Test cricket.

Dravid, fidgeting at the crease, squinting into the middle distance, was making a pact with history that he was intent on making unbreakable. The odds are that the great trio of Indian batsmen will never pass this way again on competitive business and Dravid, making it clear with every defensive prod, was utterly committed to maintaining his team's 1-0 edge for their first series win in England for 21 years.

Perhaps he had the wild idea that Friday's fusillade of fours and sixes from such as Anil Kumble and Mahendra Singh Dhoni had provided the kind of high-calibre spectacle that might have held off the need for a Mexican wave for at least 48 hours, if not for ever, and thus left Dravid and Tendulkar, both 34, and Ganguly, 35, free to leave something more of a mark than some dazzling statistics and an aching sense of how much more there might have been.

That ache, Dravid resolved, would be soothed whatever the Kennington lust for tearaway cricket. Of course, that particular mood was not exactly vibrant here two years ago when England secured the Ashes triumph that sent them rushing off to Trafalgar Square and 10 Downing Street. Then Ricky Ponting's Aussies donned sunglasses in the gloom as England, leading 2-1 in the series that meant something quite fundamental to their self-respect, snatched at the offer of bad light.

Dravid had no such option yesterday. He merely refused to enforce the follow on, out of fear that somehow crisis might spring at his throat late today if the home side somehow managed to come back after trailing by 319 runs on first innings. Dravid simply was not interested in such a possibility. Time was for him the immediate enemy, and if not a dire threat, certainly a shadow over a campaign which had been marked by a gathering determination to assert talent that too often in the past had been easily patronised as brilliant but, ultimately, just a little too frail.

There was nothing fragile about Tendulkar in the first innings here and if his face was wreathed in pain yesterday when he played on to James Anderson with just one run against his name, there was no shortage of comfort in a series of performances that most of all spoke of an old champion's refusal to let the years, and a fading touch, take away the old knack of fighting successfully at the highest level of the game.

It is cricket's worst kept secret that the "Little Master" is no longer the greatest batsman artist on earth. But if he cannot any longer make a mockery of the striving of lesser men, he can still exert a competitive streak that seems to have grown ever broader with the dwindling of the days.

On Saturday, he deprived England's Kevin Pietersen, some critics' idea of the new heir apparent to the title of the world's most naturally gifted batsman, of his wicket and in his eyes you might have sensed that he had been given the deeds to his native Mumbai. In the dusk last night Dravid called him to the bowling crease again in the hope that his leg spin might conjure another breakthrough as Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook moved in the smallest foothills of England's massive challenge.

Tendulkar scored 82 on the first day of India's final push on Thursday, and in some ways it was like watching a man negotiate a fog. But that is what he did. He negotiated the most unpromising circumstances. He moved warily, and if he did not find the bright light of his youth, he was a huge contributor to India's stranglehold on a Test match that the old guard, the three of them, had declared could not be lost.

In some ways Ganguly, the third member of the captain's circle, carries most distinction from one of the last tests of his will and his talent. In the league table of centurions, Ganguly has not covered a third of Tendulkar's extraordinary march to 37 Test centuries, but in some ways his talent has aged more easily, and more gracefully.

Yesterday, as Dravid brought the old ground close to coma, Ganguly played beautifully through the offside. It is his classic strength as a batsman; as a man, he has plainly developed into a point of philosophical maturity, something that has glowed through his ability to survive some potentially crushing injustice this summer. At Trent Bridge, he was deprived of a century when in the most beautiful groove and here he suffered a similar outrage, losing an lbw decision in the first innings which might in the old days have conjured a rush of anger.

Not here. He smiled a wounded smile and retreated to the dressing room. Yesterday, he was back in the middle of the challenge facing India's great generation of cricketers, who want so keenly to leave as winners rather than men who have too often failed to deliver the hard results that their sublime ability has sometimes demanded without satisfaction.

Dravid, Tendulkar and Ganguly now have to negotiate a last day of that old yearning on English soil. They will do it, no doubt, with a developed understanding of their huge advantage in the odds.

It is one of the fascinations of their game that extraordinary things can happen but here last night, when the Mexican waves in the crowd had disappeared like noisy, inappropriate gatecrashers at a gathering of more reflective quality, the old guard moved with a bright and optimistic stride.

Tendulkar tried his hand with the leg spin, Ganguly fielded on the balls of his feet and Dravid had the expression of a man who knew, whatever the passing frustrations, that his time as a cricketer and a leader had almost certainly arrived.

His resolve to leave anything to chance, and his relentless refusal to take anything like a risk at the crease, had perhaps left the old ground in less than a party mood. But there was no shortage of music, you had to believe, in the spirit of the old warriors who had come to England to fight as they had rarely done before. This was a day, for them, which had a point and a challenge which had nothing to do with pleasing the terraces. Indeed, the Mexican waves might have been happening on another planet.