India v England, 2014

At Nottingham, July 9-13. Drawn. Toss: India. Test debut: S. T. R. Binny.
By the last evening, this Test had passed into the realms of the surreal - as if Luis Bun˜uel had quietly slipped something into the players' drinks. Bell was wearing a helmet at second slip, Cook was imitating Bob Willis, and the groundstaff were scuttling on and off with giant mallets. As vignettes cautioning against dead pitches, these were mildly diverting; when Cook strangled Ishant Sharma with a 60mph long-hop for his first Test wicket, it was laugh-out-loud funny. But the match itself was a stinker - the first draw at Trent Bridge, without serious interruption from the weather, since India's visit in 1996.

For Nottinghamshire to produce a flat'un was no longer surprising. But, even in an age of identikit Surrey loam top-dressing, this surface was especially dispiriting: the seam bowlers induced close to 50 outside edges, of which five carried and two were caught. Teams expect at least to jostle for position at the start of a long series - yet so many errors went unpunished it was hard to draw any conclusions. For all his good humour at the end, Cook had committed the crime of being one of the few batsmen to fail.

Never before in Tests had both sides put on 100 for the tenth wicket, nor both No. 11s scored a half-century. Anderson had not known riches like it since, as an 18-year-old playing for Burnley, he had made 49 as an opener against Todmorden - although to give him the match award ahead of Bhuvneshwar Kumar was stretching it a bit. Groundsmen usually deserves leeway, not least because no one else really understands their trade. But, as early as the first afternoon, Nottinghamshire had issued something close to an apology, pleading human error on the part of Steve Birks and his team. Lisa Pursehouse, their chief executive, denied accusations that Birks had been leaned on to ensure the game went the distance, and tried to debunk vogue theories about drainage systems and fifth-day ticket sales. Either way, the pitch merited the "poor" rating handed down by match referee David Boon - only the third such ICC sanction - followed later by an official warning.

England made one change from their defeat by Sri Lanka at Headingley, restoring Stokes in place of Chris Jordan. India, for reasons less obvious, also saw fit to support four seamers with an unproven Test spinner, Jadeja. Until he helped blunt England's charge on the last afternoon, Stuart Binny had made one of the more anonymous Test debuts; the man to miss out was Ravichandran Ashwin, who bowled on the wicket during the postmatch presentation, and turned the ball more than anyone had in five days. England, consigned to field first, had a weird time of it: floods of riches immediately after an interval (they captured a combined nine for 96 in the first eight overs of each session) but deserts of poverty in between. After an infuriating first morning, Cook twigged that bowling dry was not going to work, so split the field and loaded men in front of the bat. Pujara was thought out: Cook placed Bell at short mid-on, and two balls later was rewarded with a tentative forward prod at Anderson, which Bell grabbed at full stretch to his right. A body barrage from Plunkett distressed Rahane, who snatched at a pull and toe ended - 180 degrees in the wrong direction - to Cook at silly point. Although this short stuff did lose some of its shock value, even Shane Warne - otherwise occupied by a poker hand in Las Vegas - might have conceded that Cook had got most things right.

Blind faith in his wicketkeeper was not one of them. Prior kept tidily at first in nightmarish conditions, taking countless balls on the first or second bounce. But he was too slow to get across to a low chance before Dhoni had added to his overnight fifty. Equally concerning was the ease with which India milked Ali - who scarcely bothered to come over the wicket - which meant the seamers had to grind through 142 of 161 overs. England's response was to call up Simon Kerrigan for Lord's: a logical move, but - for India - not a terrifying one.

Among a top five all new to Test cricket in England, Vijay was the one left standing at the end of the opening day. This was hardly a surface to expose technical flaws, but his hours of work with squad mentor Rahul Dravid seemed to have done some good. A flurry of fours through third man - including three off Anderson in the match's first over - gave him early momentum, and his most impressive stroke was the Dravidian leave. Even when Anderson finally prised him out on the second morning, the lbw looked high. That misjudgment from Bruce Oxenford was followed by another from the umpires: had they clamped down on Anderson's sniping just before lunch, everyone might have been spared what turned into an absurdly expensive altercation with Jadeja in the pavilion corridor.

After the break, Stokes's energy - and a direct hit by Anderson to extract Dhoni - initiated a collapse of four for two, leaving India inadequately placed on 346 for nine. But nine down is no longer the cue to pop on the dressing-room kettle. The last pair blocked stoutly at first; then Kumar worked the field like a middle-order strokemaker, and Shami had a merry swish. Not for the first time, Cook was devoid of answers. Still, he was the only one out there who spotted a feather behind by Shami in the extra half-hour before tea. On the resumption, Shami slapped Anderson into the sightscreen to follow Kumar to a maiden fifty and register the hundred partnership, which wound up at 111 runs from an Indian-record 229 balls. England had now conceded a century to the last pair in each of the past three summers, having previously done so only once before at home, back in 1929.

When Cook eventually came in, he was itching to step across and play with the full face, which in turn left his leg stump unprotected. Shami fired one in at his legs, and got lucky when it plopped off his thigh pad on to the exposed stump. Robson and Ballance profited from the sleepy conditions to grind out fifties, but India chugged away on a wicket-to-wicket line, using the bumper sparingly - and took advantage of a ball change after 54 overs which seemed to offer more swing.

The situation was crying out for Bell to go through the gears, but he raced straight into fifth, and withdrew too late from a rising Sharma delivery which clipped the underside of his bat. Seasoned observers were struggling to recall the last time Sharma - who came into this series boasting one of the worst averages (37) among those with 150 Test wickets - had bowled this well. England shed six wickets on a horrible third afternoon: Ali took his eye off a bouncer which he gloved to slip, and Prior was given out caught behind when he didn't hit it. As Kumar picked his way through the lower order for his maiden Test five-for, it felt like the natural culmination of a childhood spent in Meerut, the north Indian town famous for its SG cricket balls.

It took him a while to complete, mind. India could not resist bombarding Anderson, but there was no bounce to speak of, and the tactic of giving Root a single fed England easy runs. They were poised to become the first team in history to possess ten Test centurions until Anderson, scoreless since lunch, flashed a drive to slip on 81. He and Root had massaged the total by 198, usurping the tenth-wicket world-record 163 put on here by Australia's Phil Hughes and Ashton Agar precisely a year earlier. Pujara said India ought to develop detailed plans for bowling at the tail; it seemed incredible they had not done so already.

So England led by 39, with a day and a half to force a result. However, as just 11% of their deliveries in the first 20 overs of the second innings would have hit the stumps, one Gareth Copley, Getty Images wondered if they had learned anything at all. Anderson did force a catchable nick from Vijay, but Prior missed it altogether, and his lack of mobility - a legacy of Achilles trouble - was now a serious problem. The openers lost their wickets only out of sheer disdain for Ali, and Pujara cut lazily to backward point.

When play began on the last morning - 15 minutes late because of a downpour - the ground was less than half full. England found a smidgen of reverse to rip out the middle order in the first hour and, when the new ball became available, India were effectively 205 for six with 58 overs remaining. This, though, was an endurance test first and foremost. Earlier, Broad had been spotted up on the balcony reading Duncan Hamilton's biography of Harold Larwood - a proud Nottinghamshire lineage. But, when his second spell with the new ball was being taken by Prior, standing up, at barely medium-pace, the comparisons were thin. Bowling in this Test wasn't as tough as working down the pit, but it was about as much fun.
Man of the Match: J. M. Anderson. Attendance: 74,447.