It was a day to remember Graham Thorpe at the Oval and he would have relished the kind of full-blooded scrap that unfolded.
England needed a player of his mettle too, one who could bind the middle order together, ignore the wind-up tactics and bat his team to a series-winning position.
Instead England lost their grip on the game, folding from a strong position in their first innings then dropping three catches and missing a run-out as India built their lead in the evening light to 52.
England are an impossible team to write off, and a low-scoring game can flip in an instant, but a man down because of Chris Woakes’s dislocated shoulder will be a difficult handicap to overcome and the biggest series win of the Stokes-McCullum era could slip away on Saturday.
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