Jadeja deserved his own Headingley 2019 moment at Lord’s, but India just could not muster enough resolve

Sport is funny. Some of them last mere minutes. Others can go on for days. And a few of them can end without an outright winner. Test cricket, designed to last five days, and not necessarily mandated to have a winner, thus, occupies a quirkier place than most.

Teams can blitz out of the traps, and in the very next moment, they can stumble. Sides can be pummeled to the mat, but they can still find a way to reestablish a solid base and throw punches. And all of those idiosyncrasies came through across five riveting days at the Lord’s Cricket Ground.

At the start of day five, the game was tantalisingly poised. England had momentum after Sunday, but India had a more than decent chunk of batting left. After an hour, it felt that there was no way India could or should win. But three hours later, it felt like India, against all the odds and against cricketing logic and wisdom, might actually have a prayer.

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And that was down to just one man: Ravindra Jadeja. So often criticised – sometimes for his bowling, sometimes for his batting, sometimes just for the sake of it. But in north-west London on Monday, he was a cut above his teammates. Not for the first time ever, and probably not for the last time either.

He did not begin the day batting, but was out there fairly promptly, having watched Jofra Archer send Rishabh Pant’s off stump cartwheeling. KL Rahul was trapped lbw by Ben Stokes soon after and that started a procession of tentativeness and consequent departures to the dressing room, halted only by the lunch break.

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A fightback for the ages at the ‘Home of Cricket’

At that stage, India were eight down, and light years away from even contemplating a win. Bit by bit, though, Jadeja made them believe. Every single taken injected a bit of hope. Every single denied hinted at a player who knew exactly what was required. And every boundary smuggled (although there were not many of them) indicated that this Indian team may have been down, but not out, as long as Jadeja was at the crease.

And so it proved for more than four hours. Jadeja kept thwarting each attempted inroad England plotted. He kept trusting his lower-order partners to keep a few deliveries out, and they duly obliged. Until…Jasprit Bumrah finally lost patience and perished to an ungainly swipe.

Mohammed Siraj then took over. Showcasing the sort of determination and gritty technique India would have hoped from their top and middle order, especially with the game there to be won. Only to be denied right at the end by a freakish dismissal.

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All while Jadeja stood there at the other end, unbeaten and unblemished. So much in the zone that he did not even do his usual sword celebration for his fifty, and so consumed by the moment that he could scarcely believe the cruel end that had been meted out, despite doing everything he humanly could, and doing everything those around him could not.

Fights through to fifty, but the sword stays in its sheath.#RavindraJadeja knows the job’s not over🤞🏻#ENGvIND 👉 3rd TEST, DAY 5 | LIVE NOW on JioHotstar 👉 https://t.co/DTsJzJLwUc pic.twitter.com/Hig4Y61i8N

— Star Sports (@StarSportsIndia) July 14, 2025

There has, in fact, been a long-running joke in Indian cricketing circles – that there are things in this world only Jadeja can do. A lifetime ago, when MS Dhoni used to be active on Twitter, he had given Jadeja the “sir” moniker. Jovially, of course.

But with every passing year, with every comeback after being written off, Jadeja and Indian fans began believing in that narrative too – that Jadeja, really, could do things no one else could. With the bat, with the ball, in the field, and when thrust into the deepest of deep ends. Just like at Lord’s on Monday.

This was backs-against-the-wall stuff. England were up for the fight, the crowd was raucous too, and the series was up to be seized as well. Ben Stokes was bowling as if he owed a debt to the cricketing world for his lack of runs. Archer was hurling them down like a man who had lost time to make up for. Brydon Carse, who has quickly become one of the pantomime villains this series, was breathing fire. And Jadeja almost outlasted all of them.

There will, of course, be those who argue Jadeja should have played a few more strokes. Or that the all-rounder, in hindsight, should not have exposed Siraj to the off-spin of Bashir at all. Or taken a few more singles earlier in the innings.

This Test, though, moving only in inches on the final day, and defined by even finer margins, perhaps demanded Jadeja to make it a battle of heart, and of who wanted it more. Because deep down, he would have known how badly he wanted it, and that if England wanted to take over that mantle, they would have to run through him and over him.

Left stranded after Siraj’s bizarre dismissal

But in the end, Jadeja and his resistance was rendered a moot point, and it came down to a bizarre dribble off Siraj’s bat and the subsequent clunking of the stumps. The sort of scenario that, if you tried to recreate a thousand times, might only materialise once or twice. Just like Jadeja’s defiance.

And that is what will hurt India the most. All they needed was to ensure Jadeja’s heroics did not go in vain. Such knocks, such acts of valour and vigil, do not come around often. There is a reason these are treated as once-in-a-lifetime performances. This could have been Jadeja’s Stokes-at-Headingley-2019 moment. This probably should have been. But India just could not muster enough resolve when they really needed it.

Sadly, for Jadeja and India, this will now forever have an asterisk attached to it. And it will remain one of those instances that fans, who watched it in the flesh and on television sets around the world, will look back on in a few years’ time, and wonder what might have been.