Yours.
No, yours.
Like a stick of dynamite in a Looney Tunes cartoon, it passed from one reluctant hand to the other, and back again, before the elder's voice prevailed. It was R Ashwin's 100th Test match and he'd taken four wickets, but this ball could only belong to Kuldeep Yadav. This was his moment to savour.
This has been Kuldeep's series in so many ways. After sitting out the first Test, which India lost, he has had a massive influence on all their successes since his return. He was perhaps their second-best bowler behind Jasprit Bumrah in Visakhapatnam, and his 12-over spell on day three in Rajkot - the middle day of the middle Test with the series 1-1 - sparked a reassertion of control from a potentially hairy situation. In Ranchi, he was instrumental with both bat and ball in a comeback for the ages.
— BCCI (@BCCI) March 7, 2024
R Ashwin Kuldeep Yadav
Follow the match https://t.co/jnMticF6fc #TeamIndia | #INDvENG | @ashwinravi99 | @imkuldeep18 | @IDFCFIRSTBank pic.twitter.com/hJyrCS6Hqh
But until Thursday in Dharamsala, there hadn't been a day that was all about him. This one undoubtedly was: he dominated it to the extent that all ten wickets seemed possible at one stage.
No force seemed strong enough to allow anyone else to get a wicket. England were 55 for no loss in 17 overs when Kuldeep came on, but they could easily have lost half their side by then, with Bumrah in particular having caused all kinds of problems on a morning of low-temperature new-ball swing. England's openers had survived 29 false shots by that point; Rajat Patidar, ruled out of this match by an ankle injury, has been out six times while playing 18 false shots in this series.
Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj may have later reflected that they didn't get wickets because the cricketing gods wanted a five-course Kuldeep feast.
That's exactly what they got. In an unbroken 15-over spell, Kuldeep chipped away insistently at the loose rock of England's batting until it fell off a cliff, dismissing five of their top six as 64 for 1 became 175 for 4 in stages, setting the scene for a plunge to 218 all out. All this on a first-day pitch of no great help for spinners.
The first wicket set the tone, and at first glance it seemed to owe more to Ben Duckett's shot choice and Shubman Gill's athletic brilliance at short extra-cover than Kuldeep's wiles. But it continued a theme that Kuldeep had established on that series-shifting third day in Rajkot: it was dangled up wide of off stump, forcing the compulsively slog-sweeping Duckett to reach out and fetch. Duckett picked the wrong'un, but no batter can guess how much a ball will turn even if they know which way it will turn. This ball had more overspin on it than sidespin, and it dipped and bounced and finished outside Duckett's shot arc. It was, in its own way, superbly planned and executed, even if it wasn't one of the classic modes of dismissal.
That was to come, soon enough, in the last over before lunch, with a ball that will go down in Kuldeep folklore. The stump mic caught Dhruv Jurel telling the bowler that Ollie Pope would step out, and so it happened. Pope came charging out, and got so far down the pitch that the ball Kuldeep delivered was probably a long-hop in relation to the crease and stumps. It was, however, the perfect length in relation to the moving target Pope presented, the perfect length arrived at after tracing the perfect trajectory: up above the eyeline and down before the eyes could make sense of it. And it was the wrong'un, again, leaving Pope all alone and defenceless in the middle of the pitch.
A first session that could have been India's but for England's outrageous luck; a first session that was now, perhaps, India's after all.
These two wickets showed how much England were trying to force the pace against Kuldeep, how desperate they were to try and hit him off his length. They had every reason to be desperate, because he was getting the ball to turn and bounce alarmingly on a pitch where India's fingerspinners weren't yet finding much grip. This is what makes wristspin so potent, but you don't see too much of it at the top level because it's such a difficult art to master, forcing most of its practitioners to make a trade-off between control and giving the ball a rip.
Right through this series, it has been evident that Kuldeep is one of those rare and precious wristspinners who hasn't had to make this trade-off. He's come through other struggles, notably all the work he's put in to increase his speed through the air and zip off the pitch without compromising revolutions on the ball, but he's never really struggled to land it where he's wanted to.
It's also been amply evident that Kuldeep doesn't let his command of length falter if batters come after him. So it was in Dharamsala. He took a moment to find his bearings - and was twice punished in his first four balls for dropping short - but once he'd found them, he didn't let go.
He still conceded boundaries when he occasionally pitched one a touch too full, but England knew their margin for error was smaller than Kuldeep's, because of all the things he was getting the ball to do.
Take two balls Kuldeep bowled to Zak Crawley, one in his third over and one in his 11th. Crawley, blessed with immense reach and a wonderful eye, drove the first authoritatively between cover and mid-off. The second ball wasn't all that different, but it asked Crawley like every other Kuldeep ball to make a series of rapid judgments. He had to contend with the angle across him from left-arm over, accentuated considerably by away-drift. He had to guard against dip, and then, having guessed roughly where the ball would land, work out which way it would turn, and by what degree.
On this occasion, Crawley's judgment was ever so slightly off, and perhaps the length was just that little bit less driveable. The drift caused Crawley to reach away from his body with a diagonal rather than vertical bat, creating a gate through which the ball turned viciously to hit leg stump.
Jonny Bairstow, playing his 100th Test, was next in and next out, after a brusque and bristling 29 that included two meaty sixes off Kuldeep. Here were more attempts to hit Kuldeep off his length, and it seemed only inevitable that Bairstow's wafer-thin margin for error would catch up with him: a drive at a ball that looked driveable but wasn't, dipping and going the other way, feathered to the keeper.
Four wickets, all four the result of attacking intent gone wrong, but there was still time for a different kind of wicket.
After a promising start in Hyderabad, Ben Stokes has endured something of a horror series against spin, caught out time after time by his tendency to camp in his crease to fullish lengths. He's also struggled to pick Kuldeep out of the hand. Both these issues coalesced into the plumbest of lbws.
Kuldeep had picked up his fourth five-wicket haul in just his 12th Test match.
Seven years ago, Kuldeep had made his debut right here in the lap of the Dhauladhars, and taken four Australian wickets in another show of wristspin wizardry on a first-day pitch. He had bowled with excellent control then too, and beaten batters both in the air and off the pitch. He had bowled Peter Handscomb in much the same way he bowled Crawley on Thursday. So many of the ingredients that were on show now against England were present in Kuldeep of 2017.
"You could see his maturity in this spell"
It's why Ravi Shastri bigged Kuldeep up as India's No. 1 overseas spinner after the Sydney Test of 2019. His ability was as clear in 2017 and 2019 as it is today.
Test cricket is unforgiving, however, and India knew then that Kuldeep wasn't yet the finished product. He could confuse top-level batters, but he couldn't always hurry them. There were wrinkles in his action that could affect his control. His fitness, too, wasn't yet of the kind that would allow him to maintain his intensity over long, punishing spells.
India waited, therefore, and worked with Kuldeep as he worked on himself. They could afford to wait, of course, because they had Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja. They also had other options - Axar Patel, Shahbaz Nadeem, Washington Sundar, Jayant Yadav - who offered other attributes that from time to time pushed them ahead of Kuldeep.
This series, though, has changed all that. Kuldeep has featured in four successive Test matches, and has made his case more persuasive with each performance. No matter how much pace, bounce or turn a pitch has offered, he has found ways to exert both control and wicket-taking menace. He's bowled alongside two all-time greats, and he's held his own each time, outshining them on a couple of occasions.
It was only natural to wonder, then, when Ashwin pressed the match ball into Kuldeep's hand as India made their way off the field, with words to this effect: "I have 35 already, this one is yours." This was a ball, yes. Was it a baton too?