At Lord’s, Motie pauses progress but England leads swells

England 293 for 6 (Pope 57, Atkinson 7-45) ahead of West Indies 121 (Crawley 76, Root 68, Brook 50, and Motie 2-25) by 172 runs.

On the second morning at Lord’s, England easily reached 172 runs ahead, but Gudakesh Motie, who upheld his decision by removing Ben Stokes and Joe Root, brought them back. While England scored 104 runs in a 28-over session, the West Indies bowlers were under continual pressure, but Motie’s two wickets slowed their momentum.

Root easily reached his 93rd fifty-plus score in Test cricket after Harry Brook was bowled out for precisely fifty, putting him among the top ten highest run-scorers in the competition. However, he was bowled by the West Indies’ vintage left-arm spinner just before the lunch break for 68, making him the second England batsman to be dismissed.

After Motie removed Stokes’ middle stump off the ground, his first-season international innings ended after just 11 balls. When bowling his first over of the morning session, Motie threw the ball high and it struck a footmark, giving it a severe turn. With a gaping jaw, Stokes walked back to the pavilion when it whirled back past his bat.

And after losing his off stump to the same bowler in the penultimate over before the interval, Root was left grinning in shock. With his arm ball bowled with an upright seam, Motie went wide on the crease. Root attempted to punch into the off side, but the ball moved rapidly inward before veering even more off the pitch, smashing into the stump and thumping the bat.After losing to Kevin Sinclair for the West Indies’ triumph over Australia at the Gabba in January, it demonstrated why Motie was selected for this Test: while Sinclair, the offspinner, is a better batsman, Motie is a far better bowler. In his seven unaltered overs on the second morning, he took 2 for 22, and he ought to have been introduced into the attack sooner.

England went into the first hour of play with a lead of 66 after two days and just three wickets lost in their opening innings. As if to highlight the slow pace of this Lord’s ground, Brook and Root shared a 91-run partnership in which the latter scored a lot of runs square of the wicket.

He did not add a run when he reached his half-century, which was his 12th fifty-plus score in 13 Tests, with a back-foot punch for two. It was a meek reminder of Brook’s inconsistent record against the short ball, which Australia exposed during last summer’s Ashes, as he fell while top-edging a hook through to Joshua da Silva off a wide bouncer from Alzarri Joseph.

However, Root calmly advanced, picking up the pace during the session following a somewhat plodding start to his innings. Like Brook, he scored most of his runs close to the wicket. Joseph’s left-right punch, which involved rolling his wrists to peel off a short ball and whipping the follow-up inswinger off his pads to bring up successive boundaries, was the highlight of his innings.

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A brief partnership between Jamie Smith and Root saw Smith grab Motie’s drag-down to hit his first Test runs, worth 33. Before Root was dismissed, Smith displayed his class by hitting back-to-back boundaries off Jayden Seales, but he only managed seven runs off his opening 34 balls—an unusually cautious start.