Virender Sehwag's hurricane start to his innings yesterday raised visions of an exciting, run-filled second day's play, but what transpired was quite the opposite. India crawled at 2.56 runs per over, primarily because all the West Indian bowlers showed the control and discipline that was missing in the first Test. Of the 377 balls that were sent down today, 311 were on a good length or just short – that's a whopping 84.5%. The batsmen hardly got any easy deliveries to put away – out of the 52 full-length balls, 23 were yorkers.

All three seamers did their bit, but Merv Dillon was the stand-out bowler. The not-in-control percentage against him was no less than 26% - that is, the batsmen played and missed, edged or were rapped on the pads once every four balls. Against the other bowlers, it was only 15%.

The only batsman who conquered the conditions and kept the runs coming was Virender Sehwag. The feature of his batting was his ability to make the most of anything that was even fractionally off target – he smashed 15 from four full-length deliveries, and scored at a run-a-ball from 15 which were just short of good length.

At the other end of the spectrum was Sanjay Bangar. He scored at a niggardly 1.4 runs per over, but had a phenomenal in-control percentage of 88%. With Rahul Dravid suffering a rare failure, Bangar filled in the anchor's slot quite wonderfully.

S Rajesh is sub editor of Wisden.com in India.

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