India 145 (Rohit 66, Root 5-8) and 49 for 0 (Rohit 25*) beat England 112 (Crawley 53, Patel 6-38) and 81 (Patel 5-32) by 10 wickets

Manic, manic, manic. The speed of the final act of the third Test was, on the one hand, a gross misrepresentation of the extraordinary mayhem that had preceded it. As Rohit Sharma and Shubman Gill flogged a dispirited and under-resourced England spin attack to all corners, picking off a paltry target of 49 in 7.4 overs and with ten wickets in hand, it might have appeared to any latecomers that India’s dominance in home-spun conditions had been entirely, and predictably, unchallenged.

But on the other hand, that final flurry was a perfectly crazy denouement to a match that had been accelerating all the way through like a pair of brawlers tumbling down a flight of stairs – a contest wrapped up, with a vast six over wide long-on from Rohit, only minutes after tea on the second day of action, making the shortest completed Test match since 1935, after 17 wickets had tumbled in the first two sessions of the day, and 30 in the first five all told.

In any ordinary contest, any one of the day’s top lines would have sufficed to hold the attention, and lure in the plaudits. There was Joe Root, England’s most likely source of a revival but in his most unlikely guise, claiming the astonishing figures of 5 for 8 in 6.2 overs, the most economical five-for by a spinner in Test history, and the first by an England captain since Bob Willis in 1983.

There was R Ashwin, who rumbled through to 400 Test wickets in the course of England’s second-innings subsidence to 81 all out – the fourth Indian to reach the landmark, and the second-quickest of any nationality after Muttiah Muralitharan. And bowling in tandem with him for all but four balls of the innings was Axar Patel – at the opposite end of his career – who was denied a hat-trick by DRS but could still console himself with match figures of 11 for 80, including his third five-for in a row.

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