Cricket:Tim Bresnan was England's latest Trent Bridge hero to hasten an emphatic victory in the second test and put them 2-0 up with two to play against India. Bresnan contributed 90 runs and a test-best five for 48 with the ball in the second innings.
It was another notable individual performance to add to those of Stuart Broad and Ian Bell which also helped England turn this match around from distinctly unpromising beginnings. They are therefore within one more win of replacing India at the top of the test rankings — and occupying that position for the first time.
Bresnan ploughed on from 47 today to within sight of a maiden hundred as England piled up 544 and set a world-record run chase.
But it was with the ball that he really broke the tourists, in a spell of 8-2-17-4, as they folded to a hapless 158 all out to lose by 319 runs with more than a day to spare.
Even Sachin Tendulkar (56) was powerless to halt the slide. The Little Master rose above the rest, the only batsman in the top seven to achieve double-figures, but remains on 99 international hundreds after falling lbw playing no shot to James Anderson (three for 51) following an 80-ball half-century which put others’ failures into fair context.
Broad made the first breakthrough in an awkward 20 minutes of batting left for India before lunch. It was a significant one too, Rahul Dravid — perhaps the most obvious of potential stumbling blocks for England — edging an outswinger to be caught behind.
On the resumption, eight for one became 13 for two when Anderson produced a particularly good ball — which more than held its line after offering to swing in and took out VVS Laxman‘s off-stump.
Tendulkar could only stand and watch as Bresnan then took the ball from the pavilion end and very soon had his first two wickets for two runs in seven balls. He started with Abhinav Mukund, who had avoided falling first ball of the innings for the second time in the match when Bresnan dropped a tough chance at second slip off Anderson.
The all-rounder, in his first test since helping to clinch the Ashes in Sydney in January, produced a near unplayable delivery to have Mukund edging to slip off the shoulder of his bat — ending a 41-ball struggle for his three runs.
The scenario did not look favourable for Suresh Raina, considered to have a vulnerability to the short ball and Bresnan steaming in with seven close catchers and only two men in front of the bat. Raina tried to hook his way out of trouble but merely mistimed a catch down to long-leg, where substitute fielder Scott Elstone kept his cool.
Bresnan took two his next two wickets in two balls, Yuvraj Singh propping a catch to Alastair Cook — posted, with a helmet, at an innovative short gully. Then Mahendra Singh Dhoni went first ball, shouldering arms to one that nipped back for lbw.
Bresnan had a shot at England’s second hat-trick in three days. But unlike Broad on Saturday, he did not get his next ball right — Harbhajan Singh driving a slow full-toss past an unguarded mid-off.
He and Tendulkar launched a counter-attack which almost doubled the score and at least got India into three figures. But with Tendulkar gone to Anderson for the seventh time in his test career, Harbhajan’s hitting merely helped to delay the inevitable.
Elstone, who had put down a tough chance to reprieve Praveen Kumar on two, clung on to his second catch when Harbhajan hooked Bresnan to long-leg — leaving only the statistical finalities of England’s superiority to be settled.