India bat England into submission as Stokes’ threadbare attack drags its feet | Andy Bull
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,England’s bowlers visibly aged too as the innings went on,Brydon Carse seemed to only have one working leg by the time it was over, Chris Woakes, who bowled only seven overs on day two, all of them first thing in the morning, had apparently slipped quietly into retirement while no one was looking, and even Ben Stokes gave up flagellating himself,Among the quicks only Josh Tongue was still going, rolling in from the pavilion end like some decrepit trebuchet being wheeled up to hurl boulders at the walls of Harlech castle in the seventh year of the siege.
At the other end, Shoaib Bashir bowled more overs in this one innings than he has done in all his last 12 months for Somerset.Time was when a lot of Test cricket was played at this sort of tempo, but it’s been a while since we’ve a seen a game like it in England and, unless you’ve had the misfortune to be following the last couple of rounds of the County Championship, it takes some readjusting to get used to the slower rhythm.Before this series, we hadn’t even had a five-day game since the Ashes back in 2023.India’s was the longest team innings anyone has played against England in this country since Stokes took over as captain.You have to go all the way back to 2014, and the first Test against a very different iteration of the India team, to find one that went on longer.
It’s been coming.England’s attack looked pretty thin for stretches of both the Tests they have already played this season.And in these conditions it was left absolutely threadbare.They are partly to blame themselves.They had boundary ropes brought in tight, and Stokes said before the game that England have asked the groundstaff to produce these pitches for them, although he must have hoped for one with a bit more “bounce and carry”, as he put it, than an abandoned mattress that’s been left on the corner in the rain then peed on by the neighbourhood strays.
Edgbaston’s head groundsman, Gary Barwell, posted an insistent message on X before the match talking about how few draws there have been here recently, which made him sound like John Cleese’s pet-shop keeper in the dead parrot sketch.In the past, Stokes has been able to find a way to conjure the wickets regardless.He tried here, there were umbrella fields, with five men arrayed in a rainbow behind the wicket, and wall fields, with five in a line from mid-off to mid-on.Sign up to The SpinSubscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week’s actionafter newsletter promotionHarry Brook got to show off his medium pace, delivered from a full run, and his off-spin, delivered from a three-step one, and even alternated between them from one ball to the next.But the pitch was unforgiving, and India’s batsmen so pitilessly committed to their strategy that even the No 9, Akash Deep, who came in when the score was 574, got a quick lecture from his captain on batting responsibly after he had played and missed at a delivery.
There is an undeniable logic to it (despite, ahem, the impression eager Guardian readers have got from Thursday’s edition),Stokes’s England like to play the game at such a lick that they give the opposition a lot of time to work with, and India have decided to use it to try to bat them out of the match,The question for them is whether they have enough bowling to take 20 wickets on this pitch themselves given the way they had sandbagged their middle order with all-rounders,The key confrontation in the game may yet turn out to be between England and their own public insistence that they would rather lose a game by trying to win it than play for a draw,
‘An unjust transition’? Teesside locals divided over net zero after deindustrialisation
“We’re basically going through a deindustrialisation of the country at the moment and I think we’re losing a lot of jobs,” says John Mac, over a pot of tea in a bustling Caffè Nero in the centre of Stockton-on-Tees.The local candidate for Reform UK worked for years at the Billingham plant of Imperial Chemical Industries’s (ICI), before taking voluntary redundancy in the 1990s.Having witnessed decades of industrial decline on Teesside first-hand, including the dismantling of the once-mighty industrial behemoth, Nigel Farage’s pivot to court the working class is speaking Mac’s language.The Reform leader is targeting voters in post-industrial communities across Britain, outlined in a Guardian series showing how Farage views the “next Brexit” as reversing net zero to create a manufacturing renaissance.This, the third in the series, looks at the future of another of Britain’s industrial heartlands
UK electric car sales up by a third in first half of 2025, preliminary data suggests
British electric car sales rose by a third in the first half of 2025 after the strongest June for overall car sales since before the Covid pandemic.The number of battery electric car sales rose 34.6% to 224,838 units in the first six months of the year, according to preliminary data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), a lobby group.New car sales rose 6.8% year-on-year in June to 191,200 units, the best sales figures for the month since 2019
Fears AI factcheckers on X could increase promotion of conspiracy theories
A decision by Elon Musk’s X social media platform to enlist artificial intelligence chatbots to draft factchecks risks increasing the promotion of “lies and conspiracy theories”, a former UK technology minister has warned.Damian Collins accused Musk’s firm of “leaving it to bots to edit the news” after X announced on Tuesday that it would allow large language models to write community notes to clarify or correct contentious posts, before users approve them for publication. The notes have previously been written by humans.X said using AI to write factchecking notes – which sit beneath some X posts – “advances the state of the art in improving information quality on the internet”.Keith Coleman, the vice-president of product at X, said humans would review AI-generated notes and the note would appear only if people with a variety of viewpoints found it useful
AI helps find formula for paint to keep buildings cooler
AI-engineered paint could reduce the sweltering urban heat island effect in cities and cut air-conditioning bills, scientists have claimed, as machine learning accelerates the creation of new materials for everything from electric motors to carbon capture.Materials experts have used artificial intelligence to formulate new coatings that can keep buildings between 5C and 20C cooler than normal paint after exposure to midday sun. They could also be applied to cars, trains, electrical equipment and other objects that will require more cooling in a world that is heating up.Using machine learning, researchers at universities in the US, China, Singapore and Sweden designed new paint formulas tuned to best reflect the sun’s rays and emit heat, according to a peer-reviewed study published in the science journal Nature.It is the latest example of AI being used to leapfrog traditional trial-and-error approaches to scientific advances
Ice towels and thermal stress techniques: how players deal with heat at Wimbledon
“It was a bit of a shock to the system,” according to Cameron Norrie. For the German player Eva Lys, the conditions were “really, really tough”. Jessica Pegula, meanwhile, said the weather was “just like Florida”. The hottest-ever start to a Wimbledon fortnight has left a mark on players and spectators alike, and raised questions about how the tournament adjusts to a rapidly warming future.The numerous measures put in place to deal with the heat of the past week were not hard to spot at SW19
Andy Farrell seeks more bite from Lions for fierce contest against Waratahs
The stakes are intensifying on all fronts with the first Test now just a fortnight away. The British & Irish Lions are still trying to construct the fundamental forward pillars underpinning their game while some key Wallaby figures are nursing injuries and are missing from their side’s warm-up game against Fiji. These are the moments when, behind the scenes, elite coaches really earn their money.Despite two comfortable victories on Australian soil so far, Andy Farrell will certainly be wanting his side to shift everything up a gear, both for the sake of the collective and their own individual ambitions. For one or two this is effectively a final trial for places in the Test matchday 23, particularly so in certain fiercely contested positions
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