England’s keeper came in on a hat-trick, hit his first ball for four and never stopped battering India’s bowlers

It started in the worst possible way. By the second over of the day England were 84 for five, five hundred runs and a thousand miles behind. Their best batter, Joe Root had just been caught off the ninth ball of the morning, and their captain, Ben Stokes, who has worked so many miracles for them before, had been caught off the 10th, done by a wicked, lifting delivery, nasty, brutish and short, which brushed off his glove on its way through to the keeper.

The bowler, Mohammad Siraj, was on a hat-trick, and here comes England’s No 7, Jamie Smith, 24 years old, playing his 19th Test innings.

An unforgiving pitch and some uninspiring bowling gave Shubman Gill’s tourists an inch … and they took a mile

The sun shone, the wind blew, the grass grew, and India batted. And batted. And batted. They batted on so long that summer’s roses had budded, bloomed and withered again before they were finished. Excited little kids who had taken seats in the family stand first thing in the morning left it as jaded pensioners in the evening.

It was even rumoured that a man who had come up from London to catch the end of the innings was able to use the newly finished HS2. Among all their other achievements India’s batsmen even silenced the Barmy Army, so that by the very end the volume in the Hollies Stand was reduced to the sort of somnolent hum usually heard at Lord’s.

Batter was a model of self-control before being dismissed cheaply, with England having their three wishes granted

Turns out Rishabh Pant is a dab hand at doing impressions. At Edgbaston he showed off his new one, of the batter his coaches would like him to be. Pant was, by the standards of his own scatterbrained batting, a model of self-control, and restricted himself to just one glorious four and a single crisp, delicious six in the 60 minutes or so he was at the crease. They were good ones, a roly-poly sweep off Shoaib Bashir and a skip down the pitch to punch another of his deliveries over long-on, but otherwise Pant restrained himself to showing off his range of ascetic leaves, blocks and defensive shots.

There was, it’s true, the odd moment or two when he nearly broke character. He couldn’t help himself but come running out to try to belt one of the first balls bowled by Chris Woakes after tea over the road into the botanical gardens. He seemed to change his mind midway through his swing, and ended up scuffing it away for a single, like a kid reaching his hand out to grab a cookie and then yanking it back again as they remember the promise they’d made to their parents.