India v England: fourth Test, day one – live

England get a good look at the pitch.

LIVE – Updated at 03:50

Over-by-over report: Join our writers as the fourth Test between India and England gets under way in Ranchi.

03:50

Just over ten minutes until the start of play. I’m off to grab a coffee but will be back in time to watch the first ball hit a crack and fly over Zak Crawley’s head for five wides.

Rehan Ahmed leaves India tour

03:46

It’s just been announced that Rehan Ahmed is flying home today because of an urgent family matter. Ali Martin, our man in Ranchi, says he received the news after the team was announced yesterday, so it didn’t influence England’s selection.

Rehan won’t be returning for the fifth Test, which means Tom Hartley and Shoaib Bashir are the only specialist spinners left in the squad. I wonder what it would take for them to hit their knees in front of Liam Dawson.

03:44

Turn! Turn! Turn!

This is Graeme Swann’s verdict on the Ranchi pitch.

I’ve not seen a pitch like this in a long time. My fingers are twitching: it looks like a dried-up riverbed. There are a lot of cracks and they are very, very dry; if the ball hits those cracks it could explode. It should turn early in the game.

Deep Dasgupta, the former Indian wicetkeeper, thinks it could be hard to score square of the wicket but that it will “play much better than it looks”.

Team news

03:38

Akash Deep for Jasprit Bumrah is indeed the only change to the Indian XI.

India Jaiswal, Rohit (c), Gill, Patidar, Sarfaraz, Jadeja, Jurel (wk), Ashwin, Deep, Kuldeep, Siraj.

England Crawley, Duckett, Pope, Root, Bairstow, Stokes (c), Foakes (wk), Hartley, Robinson, Bashir, Anderson.

England win the toss and bat

03:37

It’s on! (Okay, it might not be on, but England really, really needed to win the toss.)

“The first hour should give us an indication what the pitch will be like,” says Ben Stokes.

“Yeah we would have batted first,” says Rohit Sharma with magnificent languor. “The pitch looks a little dry, with a few cracks, but that’s the nature of the pitch here. We’ve gotta play well to win the game, like we have in the last two games.”

Preamble

03:28

I have most admired him, because he had the courage and the ability not to become ordinary.

Des Hoare’s quote about the former Australian captain Kim Hughes, taken from Christian Ryan’s glorious book Golden Boy, can be applied to – or at least adapted for – Ben Stokes’ England side. They don’t have the ability of a great team, which makes their courage even more admirable and their achievements even more life-affirming.

The backlash after England were hammered in Rajkot – parts of which were disproportionate, entitled, juvenile, ignorant and miserably lacking in both empathy and respect for an awesome Indian performance – will probably make them go even harder in the fourth Test in Ranchi. They’ll mess up at times, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, and there’s every chance they’ll lose the series 4-1. So what: they’re playing away to India, the toughest challenge in Test cricket since going to the Caribbean to the West Indies in the 1980s, with a virgin spin attack and a malfunctioning middle order. The miracle is that it took until the middle day of the series for India’s superiority to become apparent.

Even now, when all logic says the series has taken a decisive turn, the hopeful voice, the one that thinks England can take this to a decider in Dharamshala, is still being given an audience. That’s purely because of all the extraordinary things they have done under Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum.

In a world full of uniform individuality, we should cherish every chance we get to watch a team of true originals. Trust me: we’ll never have it this good again, and whatever happens in the next two and a half five days won’t change that.

Right, that’s enough 3am sermonising. Let’s get on with the game.

03:26

England have announced their team early, as is their wont. Ollie Robinson and Shoaib Bashir come in for Mark Wood and Rehan Ahmed.

India’s XI hasn’t been announced but we know that Akash Deep, the right-arm swing bowler who impressed enormously against England Lions, will make his debut in replace of the rested Jasprit Bumrah. That’s likely to be the only change from Rajkot.

03:23

Interesting… very interesting