In the end, what remained was not memory but metrics. Gill’s average. Duckett’s strike rate. Siraj’s stubborn resolve. No rivalries. No bruises. No poetry. Just a scoreboard with a smile.
Yes, there were centuries to savour, spells to admire, and a finish that quickened the pulse. And yet, I write this not because of that excitement, but in spite of it because there are higher roads to the same high, and this series took the service lane.
I remain stubbornly stuck in my fool’s paradise, expecting every over-staffed Test team administration to conjure a Wasim Akram, manage a Shane Warne, unleash a Shoaib Akhtar, and luck into a Jacques Kallis. I want to treat a Siraj-like spell not as heroic, but as the expected.
I’ve arranged my life so that summers in Oxford are given over to batting — being at the crease, chasing that brief illusion of batting immortality as time dissolves and the scoreboard feels like it could climb forever.
This season, that spell has been snapped by hostile bowlers, unyielding wickets that make every innings feel fragile and fleeting. Which is why watching five Tests played on pitches engineered to grant batsmen eternal life, supported with such generous slip fielders, has induced jealousy never felt before.
Dear reader, proceed knowing you’ll almost certainly disagree with me, and I’d rather have been out there, batting on those pitches than writing about them. But the pitches were theirs, not mine, so this piece is all we’ve got; most of the stats are from memory, and a few may well be wrong.
There are times when cricket forgets its soul. And then there are times like this: when cricket remembers only the algorithms.
The 2025 India vs England series was not a tale of grit or greatness. It was a viral earworm: sticky, dumb, irresistible, humming its shallow tune through five Tests like a ringtone left on repeat. Every headline read like dopamine: Gill’s century here, Duckett’s assault there, Brook’s flourish, Nair’s return. Feed-friendly, stat-heavy, instantly disposable.
At times, this series felt less like cricket and more like a month-long infomercial for bat makers — every replay, every angle, every unchallenged forward push sending the same logo into living rooms so relentlessly you could’ve sworn it was part of the broadcast watermark.
And the pitches? Boardroom floors, pristine, unyielding, built for the comfort of the well-padded. They punished fast bowlers for existing and rewarded batters for showing up. India dared to field only one seamer in the fourth Test; England countered with five in the fifth and still couldn’t scuff the shine.
Ben Duckett’s 149 rescued England’s chase of 371 at Headingley. Gill morphed mid-series from spoiled protégé to Tendulkar redux with his Edgbaston masterclass 269 and 161. Joe Root, beautiful, clinical, ultimately inconsequential. Karun Nair returned after eight quiet years, offering starts without impact.
This wasn’t a clash of wills; it was a duel where real weapons were banned. England’s fast bowling was suggestion more than threat: tidy, unthreatening, decaffeinated. Josh Tongue topped England’s wicket tally. In contrast, Mohammed Siraj became the quiet engine for India, claiming 23 wickets across five Tests, taking nothing for granted.
Edgbaston wasn’t a battle, it was a scorer’s paradise. Gill’s double centuries looked absurdly majestic like wielding a cannon in a library. At Lord’s, the ball lost its menace fast; every bowler sensed it. At The Oval, the final Test produced edge-of-seat chaos not because the pitch offered drama, but because Siraj refused to let the moment flatten. His final spell, desperate yet disciplined, helped deliver a six-run victory that leveled the series at 2–2.
The series arc? A slow burn without combustion. Suspense, yes, but without stakes. Everyone batted, no one bled. The tension mimicked Wi-Fi outages during a Netflix binge not the existential dread of a fifth-day pitch and a game-turning spell. Players didn’t earn their performances, they were gifted them. And we, the audience, applauded saturation for substance.
Final outcome: a 2-2 draw, no heroes just influencers holding bat ads, bowlers backgrounded, and fans clapping but emotionally checked out.
Every great Test series needs a demigod with the ball. Not just a workhorse or a rhythm merchant, but someone who can, in the space of six deliveries, rearrange the story. Think of Warne circa 2005, Wasim and Waqar in ‘92, or Shoaib (of the Akhtar and not Bashir variety) in Australia. You didn’t watch them for economy or plans. You watched them for eruption.
And this was missing most acutely in the 4th Test. No one on Stokes’s team has looked remotely capable of slicing through the top order and creating that collapse on the last day — that electricity, that wild inevitability of falling wickets that makes us sit up straighter in our seats.
The result? A meandering Test match. Not poor cricket, just deeply unremarkable cricket. Passages of competence without punctuation. Good players nudging along. Bowlers doing enough to tire, but never quite enough to terrify.
If there was one constant, it wasn’t brilliance, it was blunder. Administrators so disconnected from Test cricket’s pulse they might as well be vending washing machines. The rot started in Test 1, and yet test matches 2-4 repeated it on reruns … and still they applauded the algorithm. Had England’s final match not been salvaged by cloud cover, the fifth Test would have played out as yet another bloated draw; a mercy spared only by the drizzle, not by managerial or athletic savvy.
In the end, what remained was not memory but metrics. Gill’s average. Duckett’s strike rate. Siraj’s stubborn resolve. No rivalries. No bruises. No poetry. Just a scoreboard with a smile.
It will linger, not in the bloodstream as great cricket should, but in the inbox unread, irrelevant, and impossible to delete.
Not as art. But as spam.
