England provide a glimmer of what might have been

Like the bit at the end of a gameshow where they wheel out a speedboat and say "Look what you could have won," England's cricket in the latter stages of the third day served only to show what might have been in this game.

To see England's eighth-wicket pair post the highest stand of the innings or see James Anderson and co pitching the new ball up and troubling batsmen, was to see how they should have played when the match was there to be shaped. Alanis Morissette would (wrongly) have called it ironic; England supporters might simply call it really bloody irritating. Even James Anderson admitted "there are some very frustrated players in that dressing room."

But maybe they're encouraged, too. For if we learned anything on the third day of this Test it was that England can compete. They are not up against the West Indies of the late 1970s or the Australia of the start of this century. They just have to play better.

That is not to demean Australia. In Steve Smith they have a batsman who may well be remembered as a great, while in David Warner and Nathan Lyon they have two other top-class cricketers. That seam attack deserves plenty of respect, too.

But if England are honest, they will reflect on their cricket in the first half of this game and admit they were not blown away as much as they let themselves down. Their bowling with the first new ball of the match and most of their batting was well below the required standard. As a consequence, they have allowed Australia a head-start that will surely prove decisive. To win after conceding a first-innings deficit of 215 - or win the series after going two down - would be close to miraculous.

Consider the dismissals of England's batsmen in their first innings here. Consider James Vince fencing at one he should, at that stage of his innings, have left 11 times out of 10. Consider Joe Root, drawn into a lavish drive and edging to the cordon, or Alastair Cook guiding one to slip off the face of his bat as if providing catching practice. These were soft, loose dismissals. And if three of the top four sell their wickets so cheaply, it is going to prove desperately tough to set a competitive total. "We didn't feel like we batted particularly well," Anderson said with feeling afterwards. "We should have got more runs."

Kohli joint-fastest to 50 international tons

50 - Number of international hundreds for Virat Kohli. He became the eighth batsman overall and second Indian, after Sachin Tendulkar, to get there. Kohli got there in his 348th innings, in Kolkata on Monday, the joint-quickest along with Hashim Amla, who got there in February 2017.

2 - Number of third-innings centuries for Kohli in Tests. Both have come in successive third innings outings against Sri Lanka. The first was an unbeaten 103 in Galle earlier this year. Before these two knocks, Kohli averaged 27.12 in the third innings across 25 knocks, with four half-centuries. The last India captain to score a third-innings century before Kohli was Tendulkar, who did so against New Zealand in Mohali in 1999. The previous India player to score a third-innings century at Eden Gardens was Rahul Dravid, against Pakistan in 2005.

83 - Kohli's run tally across six Test innings at Eden Gardens before this century. He was out for single digits in four of those innings. In ODIs, he has a century and three fifties in six innings here.

119 - Balls taken by Kohli to score this century - his fastest of the 18 Test hundreds. The previous quickest was off 129 balls against New Zealand in Wellington in 2013-14. Kohli scored 68.87% of batsmen runs since he arrived to the crease - 104 out of 151 - at a strike rate of 87.39. While the other batsmen contributed 47 runs at strike rate of 31.92.

9 - Number of hundreds for Kohli across formats this year - three in Tests and six in ODIs - the most by him in any calendar year. He made eight hundreds, his previous best, in 2012 and 2014.

0 - No captain has made more international hundreds in a year than Kohli's nine this year. Ricky Ponting (2005 and 2006) and Graeme Smith (2006) also made nine hundreds. Kohli still has six internationals left this year to set a new record.

1 - Kohli is the first India captain to score a duck and a century in the same Test. He's the 18th captain overall to do so. Last India player to do so was Cheteshwar Pujara, also against Sri Lanka, in Colombo (SSC) in 2015. The last instance of an Indian doing this at home was Dravid, against England in Mohali in 2008.

Lehmanns can make it work - Alec Stewart

Over the coming days, when Australia's selection panel sits down to finalise the squad for their opening Ashes encounter in Brisbane, at some point during the conversation, Darren Lehmann will have to excuse himself from the room. If the name of his son, Jake Lehmann, comes up - and it almost certainly will, even as an outside choice - then senior Lehmann will leave the other selectors to deliberate without him.

While this process will be the result of a formal Cricket Australia Board directive to avoid conflicts of interest, it seems Darren Lehmann actively prefers not to be involved. "I'd be that nervous anyway I probably wouldn't be coach, I'd probably go to the bar," he said when the subject arose last year. Should Jake put on another good showing in this week's Sheffield Shield, the old man might have to come up with a coping strategy by the time Australia and England step out at the Gabba on November 23.

One former Ashes combatant who knows a fair bit about the father-son, coach-player dynamic, albeit from the English perspective, is Alec Stewart. England's second-most capped Test cricketer, Stewart began his international career in 1989, at a time when his dad, Micky, was manager of the team. Fortunately, they already had a well-established method for making the relationship work.

"When I signed professionally at Surrey as a 17-year-old, he was manager of the Surrey side then," Alec told ESPNcricinfo. "We'd obviously spoken about it, when I left school he knew I wanted to try and play cricket. He was only ever going to sign me if he felt I was good enough - he almost took the surname or the relationship out of the question, he just looked at me as a cricketer.

"That's what we made very, very clear. When we were at home, he's obviously me dad but when we were at cricket - or work, because that's what it was - then I didn't have a dad who was the coach and he didn't have a son who was a player. I was a player and he was very much coach, or manager. I never called him or referred to him as 'dad' when I was at work. Once we got home, or at a family occasion, he's dad and still is. But when we're at work it's very much a player-coach relationship."

Whether with Surrey or England, Micky was always "gur" (short for manager) to Alec, just as he was to everyone else. Although, he adds: "I might have called him a few other names under me breath if he dropped me."

The incredible rise of Jasprit Bumrah

It was Mohammed Siraj's international debut and he had been plundered for 10 and 16 in his first two overs. Siraj was at the receiving end of a merciless Colin Munro on a flat deck in Rajkot. When he finished his second over, Jasprit Bumrah walked up to him and put his arm round his shoulders to console him.

Bumrah tried to comfort Siraj, telling him every bowler gets hit and that they learn by getting hit. Bumrah is not the senior-most bowler in the Indian team; it's Bhuvneshwar Kumar. Bumrah still took the initiative to calm Siraj's nerves when he could have stayed back at his fielding position between overs. Bumrah himself is less than two years old in international cricket but he chose to take the responsibility upon himself, just the way he has as a bowler in the absence of more experienced quicks such as Umesh Yadav and Mohammed Shami.

On that day, it was primarily because of Bumrah that New Zealand did not race away to score over 200. He pulled the length back on the batting-friendly pitch when good-length balls and slower ones were being launched into the stands. In his second spell, he returned to stem the flow of boundaries in the death overs when Munro was "going berserk", in Bumrah's words, by giving away only 14 in his last two overs.

Bumrah has risen through the ranks at incredible pace and given the team management immense flexibility, allowing them to rely on him and Bhuvneshwar as their lead new-ball pair in both T20Is and ODIs while resting Shami and Umesh for the Test cricket. When he made his international debut in early 2016 in Australia, it was mainly his outlandish action and angle that deceived batsmen. Since then, players from around the world have had time to adjust to him - by now they have had 57 international matches to watch him in and try to pick up his weaknesses.

But Bumrah has been one step ahead. To add to the yorker he learnt from Mumbai Indians team-mate Lasith Malinga, he now possesses variations that include deceptive slower deliveries, in particular the offcutter. Within two years, he has emerged as the specialist death bowler India had desperately been seeking for many years.

"The kind of action he has, batsmen find it difficult to pick him, but he has also improved on a few things," Bhuvneshwar explained on the eve of the third T20I. "He has had a yorker, he has improved his slower deliveries too. When you bowl with such a bowler, you are confident that if you do well, he will also do well from the other end. If you aren't having a good day, at least he will bowl well. We feed off that confidence. The best part is before every match we talk to each other about the wicket and what strategy we can employ. That helps a lot."

Bumrah's package of skills was on display in Kanpur too, during the decisive third ODI when New Zealand were on track to chase down 338. Another flat track and Bhuneshwar was being taken to the cleaners. But Bumrah stepped up. He sent down some of his slower offcutters - removing Ross Taylor with one of them - and then defended 15 off the last over when dew made the ball difficult to control. Such was Virat Kohli's faith in him that Bumrah bowled four of the last 10 overs and he is relied upon to bowl his last two at the death in T20Is too. It reflects in how he has delivered more than one-third (34.37%) of the death overs bowled by Indian bowlers since his debut last year.

Being stingy as a bowler is one undebatable advantage but Bumrah has combined that with wickets. Only 10 months ago, England were chasing 146 in the Nagpur T20I and needed 41 from the last five overs, with Ben Stokes and Joe Root at the crease and seven wickets in hand. There was no Bhuvneshwar that day, but Bumrah had the wily old Ashish Nehra for company. Once Nehra dismissed Stokes, Bumrah bowled a combination of hit-the-deck back-of-a-length deliveries and slower balls that turned into four dot balls to Root and Jos Buttler in the 18th over.

Sri Lanka suffer 12th straight defeat

Playing just his second ODI, Usman Khan destroyed Sri Lanka's top-order, striking four times in 11 balls and then completing a five-for off his 21st delivery. Since 2001, only two bowlers have completed a five-wicket haul in fewer balls. Chaminda Vaas did it in 16 balls against Bangladesh in Pietermeritzburg in the 2003 World Cup, which included a hat-trick from the first three balls of the innings, and Netherlands' Timm van der Gugten completed a five-for in 20 balls against Canada in 2013. Usman is only the second Pakistan bowler after Bilal Asif to take a five-wicket haul in his first two ODIs. Bilal also did it in his second match, in 2015.

All downhill after winning the toss

Sri Lanka, trailing 4-0, chose to bat first after they called right at the toss. That turned out to be the only good thing to happen to them all day. They lost two wickets in their first over, two in their third and were four down with only eight runs on the board. Only once have they lost their fourth wicket at a lower score. Three of their top five batsmen were out for ducks - Sadeera Samarawickrama, Dinesh Chandimal and Niroshan Dickwella, and this was only their third such instance in ODIs.

The visitors couldn't really recover from that nightmarish start and were eventually all out for 103, in 26.2 overs. It was their shortest innings, and second-lowest score, after choosing to bat first. It was also the fewest overs Pakistan have taken to dismiss their opposition after losing the toss and having to bowl first.

Sri Lanka's innings was the ninth-shortest for any team after electing to bat first.

Five consecutive tons in the UAE for Babar Azam

Pakistan's young sensation Babar Azam raced to his seventh ODI century in just his 33rd innings, making him the quickest to the mark. He got there eight innings quicker than, who scored it in his 41st innings. Among Pakistan batsmen, the quickest was Zaheer Abbas in 42 innings.

The century in the second ODI was Azam's fifth successive one in the UAE. He's the first ever player to score five consecutive centuries in a country. He had hit three in three games against West Indies last year before this series. The previous record holder in this case was AB de Villiers with four tons in a row in India. Among Pakistan players, Zaheer Abbas and Saeed Anwar had scored three successive tons in the UAE. Azam's five tons are now the second-most by any player in the UAE, trailing the seven scored by Anwar and Sachin Tendulkar.

Azam scored his first century on September 30, 2016 and has made seven since. All other Pakistan batsmen have a combined three hundreds in this period: one each for Azhar Ali, Shoaib Malik and Fakhar Zaman. David Warner is the only other player to score seven centuries in this period.

One thing that has stood out in the last 13 months is his Azam's conversion rate of fifties into hundreds. In the 18 innings since the start of series against West Indies last year, Azam has failed to make a century only once after going past 50. That was against Australia at the WACA, when he was dismissed for 84. In 15 innings prior to this period, he had scored five fifties but couldn't convert any of those into hundreds. Out of 11 players who have scored three or more centuries in this period, no other player matches the fifties to hundreds conversion rate of Babar's 87.50%. Warner is next on the list with 77.78% - with seven hundreds from nine 50-plus scores.

Sri Lanka's first-innings feast, second-innings famine

The Sri Lanka batsmen put in contrasting performances in both innings in their first ever day-night Test in Dubai. After putting up 482 runs in 159.2 overs in the first innings, they were bundled for just 96 in 26 overs in the second innings. This was only the sixth instance in Tests when a team was bowled out for under 100 after posting a 400-plus total in their first innings. Sri Lanka were involved in the previous instance as well, with scores of 400 and 82 against England in Cardiff in 2011. No other team has done this after 2000.

The difference in Sri Lanka's totals was 386 runs, which is their highest ever difference in totals of two innings in a Test. Their previous highest was 383 against Australia in Colombo (SSC) in 1992. It was also the first instance of any team having a difference of over 350 runs in their totals in a Test against Pakistan. Sri Lanka had a lead of 220 in the first innings. Their second-innings total of 96 is the lowest for any team after gaining a first-innings lead of over 100 runs. The previous lowest was South Africa's 99 against Australia in Durban in 1950 after having a lead of 236.