Scorecard

Morning session

The dismissal of Rahul Dravid [Images] off the 11th ball of a fourth morning where play yet again started half an hour early was a whiff of pure oxygen for what, on day three, seemed a dying Test.

Jerome Taylor bent one back in off the seam on length; Dravid defended down the wrong line and took it on his front pad, marginally outside line of off stump, and umpire Brian Jerling got to raise his finger for the first time, for an LBW decision, in his career (157/3; 22/46 Dravid).

The thing is, Dravid was out, if you interpret the LBW law the way it is meant to be - the ball was in the channel and close to the stumps, it was clearly moving in towards the batsman and the stumps and, as clearly, if the pad had not intervened, it would have hit somewhere between off and middle - to my mind, that called for the finger. (I know the rule says if the batsman is playing a stroke and is hit even fractionally outside off, he is deemed not out, but I think that is a sucky rule, so.)

Commentators in the box have been raising eyebrows at the decision - and that owes to two factors. The first is what I mentioned in parenthesis above -- the fact that Dravid was clearly playing a defensive stroke - his bat was in front of the pads and pushing at the ball at the time of impact, and the rule says.

More to the point, though, it was inconsistent umpiring by an adjudicator who through the duration of the West Indies innings turned down a good half dozen dead on the money appeals. I mean, Corey Colleymore was hit just above the ankle, on the back foot, after having gone back into his crease to the first ball he faced from Harbhajan Singh. The ball was in line with middle, the strike was about five inches in front of the stumps, and yet there was some `doubt' for the umpire to give the batsman the benefit.

For that umpire to raise his hands to this one is precisely the kind of thing that causes heartburn and, in more heated minds, trigger the sort of `racist' talk that has Malcolm Speed [Images] coming up with his own version of the Gettysburg address.

There was no doubt whatsoever about the second wicket, in Taylor's next over. Or more accurately, the only doubt was about the sanity of a batsman who inexplicably seems to have switched from inspirational form to the reverse. The ball was angled across the left hander, and Yuvraj Singh [Images] with zero foot movement poked at it in a way that would embarrass even a kid holding a bat for the first time; the resulting edge went comfortably to Denesh Ramdhin (159/4; 0/0).

Two deliveries later, the Titanic [Images] hit the iceberg a second time. Taylor bowled one marginally short and angling onto Mohammad Kaif's pads; Kaif, moving onto middle, flicked and missed and umpire Jerling was again quick to send the batsman back to the hut (159/5; 0/0).

This time round, though, there was a definite problem - the ball was clearly missing the leg stump by a few inches.

The best that could be said for the frenetic period of play was that the spectators had reason to be happy - the newbie umpire had managed, in the space of under half an hour, to revive flagging interest in the Test.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni [Images] joined VVS Laxman, and the two settled down to bat in their respective styles. Laxman, who during the second hour of the morning got to his 50 (143 balls; his first 50 in eight innings dating back to the first innings against Pakistan, in January this year) settled down to bat time and looked increasingly solid in front of the wicket and on the on side. Not quite so much outside off, where on occasion he swished and missed, or swished and edged, against the seaming/reversing ball and was lucky to see the nibbles fall short of the slips.

An interesting aspect of how Laxman batted was the very deliberate, very apparent effort he made to not move his front foot quite so much forward and across, concentrating instead on getting the foot beside and not behind the line of the ball and the bat well ahead of the pad. Clearly, the two LBWs of earlier in the morning were working on the batsman's mind - in the way he batted there was intent to not take a ball on the pad, even outside the line, if he could help it.

Dhoni, on the other hand, was a touch painful to watch - not so much because of some technical problem, as because a very conscious decision to bat contrary to his natural free-flowing style found him caught between two stools.

That is most marked in that channel around off - when playing his natural game, his tendency is to glide the front foot forward and hit through the line and very straight; here, he opted for a more defensive approach and his idea of defense to that line is to crawl sideways rather than forward and use his bat like rowers use their oars, in a kind of circular movement calculated to have any decent slip fielder salivating.

Rather curiously, though he had India on the ropes at the start of the session, Lara sat on the fence for the most part. Just two slips, which was even more remarkable against a Dhoni playing the way he was; no particular hurry, no bustle, on the part of either bowlers or fielders, a kind of gentle amble through the proceedings that was inexplicable given the situation. (The slips finally came back into their own just before lunch, for Kumble - three of them and two gullies).

As play wound down towards lunch, India lost another wicket - that of Dhoni who, to a Corey Colleymore delivery angling across him onto leg, again opted to stay half-cock, looking to nudge. He missed, the ball hit the pad in front of middle and leg with the batsman on top of the crease, and umpire Jerling made it a hat-trick of LBWs for the morning and no worries about the slant on the ball taking it past leg stump, either; the dismissal in fact was a carbon copy of the Kaif take-out earlier in the morning. (220/6; 29/56).

You've got to say this for the umpire - if not consistent, he is at least fair. Having spent one entire innings giving everything to the batsmen, he is now spending the next innings giving it all to the bowlers; fair enough.

At lunch, India was on 241/6 after 75 overs; the 150-minute session produced 91 runs in 29 overs for the loss of four wickets.

Post-Tea session