James Lawton: Echoes of Grace resound as Tendulkar and company expose English frailties

If Sachin Tendulkar was not such an unassuming cricket legend, the umpire who is generally rated the best in the world might just have heard something close to the growling breath of the great W G Grace.

The good doctor's famous declaration, after suffering what he considered a wrong and impertinent dismissal, was that the great crowd had come to watch him bat rather than some wretched umpire get it wrong. Support for such a sentiment, even among some of England's staunchest supporters, surely reached into every corner of this historic ground yesterday when the Australian Simon Taufel ruled that a delivery from Paul Collingwood would have hit Tendulkar's off stump had it not first collided with the Little Master's pad.

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This was plainly wrong - and particularly unfortunate for two reasons. One, and most important, was that Tendulkar had batted with beautiful certainty to get within nine runs of still another record - his 38th Test century.

The other was that Collingwood, for all his virtues of professional zeal, would normally wake up and apologise if he even dreamt that he might just beat a Tendulkar who had played himself to the point of draining the life out of an England team which had supposedly healed the wounds inflicted so deeply in Australia last winter and the World Cup in the spring.

In fact, long before the Tendulkar breakthrough - India were 342 for 3 at the time, 144 ahead on first innings - the new, and so far winning, England coach Peter Moores must have been experiencing his own private moment of truth.

It was that while England were able to mop up the sadly diminished West Indians easily enough, any assumption that they are now back in rude competitive health has to be considered premature.

As they now fight a hugely uphill battle against going 1-0 down to a team three places below them in the world rankings - and their first home series defeat since they were eviscerated by Steve Waugh's Australians six years ago - Moores has to be concerned about what can only be described as a parody of emotional equilibrium.

This, after all, is the team who for two days now have been generating the kind of sledging, body-language aggression that any self- respecting Aussie would probably suggest might be most appropriately dressed in a girl's blouse.

There wasn't much of even this pale version of battling commitment when Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly (79) and V V S Laxman (54) stretched the Indian lead to 283 before England faced 16 overs in the evening sunshine. But then it erupted, on schedule, when the Indian tail-enders began to appear, Kevin Pietersen provoking both umpires into a complaint to the temporary captain Andrew Strauss when he greeted the first-innings bowling hero Zaheer Khan at the crease with an abusive volley.

England's defence is that they are still smarting over their failure to nail down victory before darkness came to Lord's in a first Test they believed they had done more than enough to win.

They also feel that the flying start to the Indian first innings provided by Dinesh Karthik and Wasim Jaffer was substantially helped by the kind of umpire error which sent back both Tendulkar and Ganguly yesterday. Result: an unconvincing bowling performance yesterday that was redeemed mainly by the aggressive instincts of Ryan Sidebottom. The hirsute hustler is never likely to win any style awards, but when he isn't giving a poor man's version of paceman histrionics he bowls with great spirit and application, and when he removed one of the Indian batting heroes of Lord's, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, it was fair reward for a serious and good-hearted body of work. But then Sidebottom is unlikely to survive the return to fitness of Steve Harmison and, above all, Andrew Flintoff.

In some quarters such relief is being painted as something close to the arrival of the Seventh Cavalry, but the reality here yesterday seemed to be suggesting that England's priority is not to rely on old glory - which is stretching back two years now to the Ashes summer - but a step closer to the kind of consistency of performance which was shown yesterday by opponents who were supposed to have long ago entered the ranks of the underachievers.

That was exposed as somewhat ludicrous analysis when you considered the frailties of England's first-innings batting performance and the extraordinary contrast provided yesterday by three of India's four great contemporary batsmen, captain Rahul Dravid having disappeared in Saturday night's dusk while in the foothills of what promised to be another knock of daunting facility and nerve.

All of Tendulkar, Ganguly and Laxman produced moments of withering authority as they accumulated between them a total of 224 runs which, you have to believe, would have been significantly augmented if first Tendulkar, then Ganguly had not gone through official error. Tendulkar is usually close to a pinnacle of philosophical maturity when the umpires conspire against him, but this time he was not quite the paragon of forbearance.

He lingered for five seconds, reflecting on what television evidence would confirm in the split second that followed his decision to pad up against a ball that he knew was going to pass his off stump. How did he know? Because he is Sachin Tendulkar. Because it is a sense you acquire when, like Brian Lara, his only other rival as the greatest batsman of his age, you pass a total of 11,000 runs. While amassing such a total, you know when to play, and when to leave it and that is why he dragged his way from the field and out of the sunshine.

Nor was Ganguly thrilled, whatever the report of a "snickometer", when he was sent on his way.

His, in fact, was the innings of the day. Unlike Tendulkar, who was willing to graft with ultimate concentration after the sickening, faceguard-popping bouncer he received from James Anderson on Saturday, and Laxman, who appeared to have entered a coma towards the end of his innings, Ganguly was always intent on writing the day's agenda. In the early part of his innings he stroked some beautiful boundaries through the offside. Always a scrapper, and often an agent provocateur, here was a former captain pushing hard behind the gut feeling that England were on the run.

At the finish, Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook were showing a degree of defiance. They were disputing the possibility that the new England were inevitably going to be set back by the old and subtle force of the best of one generation of Indian talent.

Today, and maybe tomorrow, we will no doubt get a deeper guide to the strength and the resolve of a team which fell so far, so quickly, from those days when they thought that by winning an Ashes series they had conquered a cricket world that would stay beaten for some time. Yesterday the story was rather different, and it required new depths of effort.

England's response, it had to be said, was a little too erratic to inspire too much confidence. They could only be grateful for that thunderous echo of W G Grace.