ENG vs IND: KL Rahul — The grace of resistance

For a team that has, across this series, often appeared the more rounded and resourceful, India came perilously close to finding itself 3–1 down. Instead, it left Manchester with the series alive. A 2–2 score-line was still within reach. The draw it earned was not the product of weather or time lost. Gloomy skies lingered through much of India’s second innings, but the rain never arrived. The resistance came from bat and mind, not in the least, from opener KL Rahul.

I first met Rahul by the poolside at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru in 2017. I was part of the PR team for the Karnataka Premier League, and an auction was due in a couple of days. Rahul was around for a shoot. Someone asked me to grab a quick Q&A with him. He was already part of the Indian setup by then, but there was no entourage, no theatre. Just a player who answered every question with clarity, patience, and a studied calm — as if deflecting attention with the same soft hands he used to play late.

That was my first glimpse of his quiet discipline. Watching him at Old Trafford, it struck me again how little the essential temperament had changed.

Even before the series began, there were signs. A photograph of Rahul in action during a quiet, intra-squad match in Beckenham was lauded online for artfully capturing his craft. Rahul played a kneeling drive that seemed to distill his method in a single movement — high elbow, hard hands, balance held a fraction longer than necessary. The ball disappeared, but he remained exactly where the stroke demanded him to be, composed and precise. It was not a shot that sought applause. It was an act of alignment.

At Old Trafford, he brought that same stillness into sharper focus.

Earlier in the week, Kevin Pietersen had posted a reflection that seemed to echo across the Old Trafford outfield: “Cricket is a team sport played by individuals. It’s actually more of an individual sport than one thinks.” It’s the kind of statement that sounds provocative until you watch a Test unfold. Sessions ebb and flow. Matches turn on a single spell or a solitary stand. And then it becomes plainly true — especially when one of those individuals chooses stillness over spectacle.

Rahul remains a curious case in Indian cricket. Elegant in method, classical in set-up, yet oddly unfulfilled in record. Until this match, he had never made more than one hundred in a Test series, never crossed 400 runs on a single tour. His average hovered, stubbornly, in the low thirties. And yet, few batters have looked more at home in English conditions in recent times.

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At Old Trafford, he reminded everyone what a proper opener looks like. There was a quietness to his innings. Unshowy, even subdued, but it had weight. This was the fourth time in as many Tests that he had crossed fifty, a run of consistency that has long eluded him. His half-century came in 141 deliveries and featured just three boundaries. It was an innings shaped less by strokes than by stillness; Rahul doing his usual thing: playing late, picking his moments, and being decisive about what to play and what to leave. His defence was immaculate, his tempo deliberate. For long stretches, he played the silent partner to Shubman Gill’s more expressive repertoire.

Together, they added 184 runs. A stand that began with India at none for two, and will now go into the books as the highest third-wicket partnership in Test history after a team has lost both openers without scoring. The previous best — 105 by Mohinder Amarnath and G. Viswanath at Melbourne in 1977 — was left far behind. They batted for 417 deliveries, the longest stand by Indian batters in England since 1998. Not since the days of Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly at Trent Bridge has time been occupied so meaningfully by an Indian pair here.

Bit by bit, the needle moved. The ball grew older, the pitch quietened, Ben Stokes wasn’t bowling. The advantage wasn’t seized all at once but accumulated slowly, through spells and sessions.

Eventually, as ever, England turned to its captain. Stokes had not bowled on day four, and his body remains a reluctant partner. But he willed himself through two morning spells. Grimacing, pausing, stretching, he summoned the delivery that broke through — a skidding in-swinger that tailed in and trapped Rahul on the pad. The ball kept low, a true Old Trafford grubber, and Rahul, with barely a glance at the umpire, walked.

Ben Stokes of England celebrates after dismissing KL Rahul of India during Day Five of the 4th Rothesay Test Match between England and India.
| Photo Credit:
CLIVE MASON/Getty Images

The dismissal felt heavier than a mere number. Rahul’s 90 won’t find space on a list of milestones, but it mattered more than most hundreds. It was the kind of innings that rearranges conversations. With it, he became the first visiting opener to cross 500 runs in a Test series in England since Graeme Smith’s 714 in 2003. Only Gavaskar has made more as an Indian opener on English soil. Rahul now has 511 runs this series, and 1125 career runs in England, already past Virat Kohli’s tally. If form and conditions permit, he may soon overtake Dravid (1376) and Gavaskar (1152) on that list too.

He had faced the conditions, played the pitch on its terms, and absorbed the rhythms of a Test match that seemed to drift before snapping back into tension.

In the end, he did enough. The series is still alive. A final word remains unsaid.

And in the margins, Rahul’s innings will linger. Not for its brilliance, but for its restraint. In a series that has often veered between chaos and collapse, this was a rare moment of poise.