Crawley’s straight six off Neser was the first truly authoritative shot of the chase, after Duckett had whipped a pair of early boundaries off his toes in between a series of play-and-misses. Kept in his crease by Alex Carey’s decision to stand up to the stumps, Crawley’s reach turned a good-length ball into a half-volley, which he swung firmly back down the ground.
“I thought the way they started with the bat was good,” Smith said. “They were really aggressive, tried to break the back of a reasonably small chase on a tricky wicket and they got off to a bit of a flyer. A couple of their heavy blows softened our seam quite a bit and probably didn’t offer quite as much as it had for the rest of the game after that, so credit to them.
“They obviously played some shots where they hit the ball pretty hard and then I think Zak hit one into the LED boards, and that definitely softened the seam, no doubt about it. But credit to them for doing that.”
The ball continued to deviate after Crawley’s six – even if to a slightly lesser extent – but Smith identified it as the turning point on the final day. “I think [the ball] did a fair amount for the whole game – [it was] just probably when the ball got softened from a few lusty blows from their top order today, where it started to go a little bit less, potentially,” he said at the post-match presentation. “Without that, it [the pitch] was still going to offer plenty.”
Stokes, meanwhile, praised his batters for committing to their attacking style in conditions that rewarded it, before adjusting their gameplan once the field spread. “There was only one way of going about chasing that tally down, which was to go out there and try to put the pressure on from ball one, to be honest,” he said.
“Your best possible way of being successful out there was looking to be very proactive against a very, very good bowling attack who are relentless in their line and length, and on a wicket like that, you can’t allow bowlers to be able to just run up and put the ball where they want to without putting them under some kind of pressure.”
Crawley went on to score 37 off 48 balls – the longest innings by an England batter in either innings of a bizarre, fast-forward Test match – and is now England’s leading run-scorer in the series with 256, despite his pair in the first Test.
“When Zak and Ben started building a partnership, the field started to go back and then [they] were able to rotate,” Stokes added. “Zak identified that moment and then played slightly differently. It wasn’t just the boundaries that were allowing us to tick that total down; it was the ones and twos, and the running between the wickets… I was very pleased with the way that we went about that.”
“That wicket was very tricky, especially with a newer ball, and the top order from both teams were struggling to find a way to consistently score runs or feel any fluency,” Stokes explained.” We went with an idea of sending someone who’s got talent with the bat and a very good eye for hitting the ball [in at No. 3].
“If he gets a quick 20 or 30, that’s massive in a very small run chase, but unfortunately it didn’t quite come off. Even the 15-20 minutes he spent out there made it a little bit easier for Beth [Jacob Bethell, who made 40 from No. 4] to build the innings that he did.”
Stokes also revealed that he had initially floated the idea of sending the hamstrung Gus Atkinson up the order, only to realise that he would not have been allowed to. “There was a bit of a dumb moment from me… I realised after about 15 minutes ‘he can’t bat until No. 8 anyway’ because he’d been off the field, so that quickly went out of the window.”
Matt Roller is a senior correspondent at ESPNcricinfo. @mroller98