Former England captain Nasser Hussain slammed Shubman Gill and his team’s bizarre ball change request early on in the second day of play in the Lord’s Test on Friday, despite Jasprit Bumrah and the other pacers making the second ball talk move to their tunes.
After bowling on 13 deliveries with the second new ball on the opening day, where Joe Root and captain Ben Stokes shored up the side past 250 for the loss of only four wickets, Bumrah made sharp rearrangements in the first session on Day 2. Bumrah knocked over Stokes with a sharp nip-backer before having centurion Root drag one back to the stumps and snipping Chris Woakes out first ball within a span of 12 deliveries in his spell.
Having taken the fresh Dukes at 80.1 overs overnight, Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj even troubled wicket-keeper Jamie Smith early on before he was dropped by KL Rahul in the slips. However, skipper Gill and Co. began raising pleas for a ball change around the 90th over before the umpires granted their request. But the Indians were left displeased by the quality of the red ball offered to them.
“This is 10-over-old ball? Seriously?” Siraj was heard on the stump-mic, the nature of the ball even leaving the commentators perplexed.
However, Hussain picked up on India’s odd request that eventually backfired. With Smith and seamer Brydon Carse slamming half-centuries, England moved up from a precarious 271 for seven by adding 116 more runs for the last three wickets.
Absolute nonsense from Nass. Ball was changed coz it was out of shape.
And the ball after that was again changed because it was again out of shape.
Reading the situation worse than Gabba 2002. pic.twitter.com/YXcNnyf8AU
— S (@reversepaddle) July 11, 2025
“It was a very odd ball change from India. There’s two reasons you change a cricket ball. One is because the umpires think it’s gone out of shape, or two, because the bowling attack and the captain realise that the ball is doing nothing and you try and get the umpires to change it.
“The ball was doing everything this morning. The ball they had, for 63 deliveries, was zipping round corners. Bumrah was going through a magic spell. Siraj at the other hand was having catches dropped. The ball was carrying through to the wicketkeeper. It was doing everything. It was doing more than at any stage in the Test match.”
“I cannot work out why you’d want to change a ball that was doing this much, sixty-three deliveries of the ball zipping round,” the former England skipper continued. “Not only did they want it changed, but the captain got really animated when they didn’t change it. I thought it was one of the most bizarre decisions.
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“You’ve got a ball in your hand that’s doing a lot. We all know these Dukes balls are variable. He’s still on the umpire about the ball change. Now maybe he’s having a word with the umpires about, ‘this ball isn’t as good as the last one’. But that’s the problem with trying to change the ball, which is that if you’ve got a good one, stick with it. I thought it was a really odd thing for a) India to do and then b) to get really animated and now c) to say, well, the ball we got is no good. Don’t change the good one.”
‘Bumrah may not have been ready’
Speaking on the incident, former India wicket-keeper Dinesh Karthik suggested that seam spearhead Bumrah, who eventually clocked his 15th Test five-for and a first at Lord’s, wasn’t prepared for his captain’s move to call for the ball change.
“A bit odd, considering how much that ball was moving, probably the most in this Test match and consistently as well. They delivered 63 balls with it and quite a few of them moved. So, I don’t know what the conversation was. It felt like [Mohammed] Siraj initiated that and Shubman was there, Bumrah looked like he wasn’t ready for it to be changed, but it happened,” said Karthik.
