Close West Indies 189 for 3 (Hinds 100, Gayle 80*, Harbhajan 3-43) trail India 358 by 159 runs
Scorecard

The score was 172 for 0, and some West Indian faces were smiling at last. Then Harbhajan Singh struck like summer lightning. With three wickets in the space of 14 runs, including two in his 23rd over, Harbhajan wrenched the momentum out of West Indian hands just before play was called off early for bad light.

It seemed that Wavell Hinds (100) and Chris Gayle (80 not out) had ended the deluge of media pictures of a gloomy Carl Hooper looking like a bankrupt depressive. Their 172-run stand, the highest for West Indies in this series and the best for their first wicket at Eden Gardens, gave West Indies a glimmer of hope of winning.

So it seemed, before Hinds swept Harbhajan straight into Sourav Ganguly's hands at square leg and Ramnaresh Sarwan, lunging forward to a top-spinner, was stumped smartly by Parthiv Patel only 14 runs later. Two balls after that, Harbhajan bowled Merv Dillon, the hapless nightwatchman, with a quicker one that spun the other way.

The Hinds-Gayle opening show had promised a better ending. Finely blending caution and aggression on a good batting pitch, Gayle and Hinds refused to flounder against a spinners' line of attack that was pitched outside leg and turning into them. Their feet got to the pitch of the ball and their fluent drives repeatedly carved through the infield on either side of the wicket. They hit 30 fours and a six between them.

It was chanceless batting. A few shouts for bat-pad catches, including one off Hinds on 99, were rightly turned down. Harbhajan and Anil Kumble had little help from a pitch that showed some life late in the day. Javagal Srinath was under-worked – he bowled only six overs all day – and Ashish Nehra struck a rhythm only after Hinds was out. Strangely, Virender Sehwag was not among the six bowlers used, although Sachin Tendulkar was.

After bowling out India for 358 in the morning, West Indies had gone in to lunch at a quiet 23 for 0. But the morning had been anything but quiet earlier. Eden Gardens erupted as Srinath and Patel's run-a-ball eighth-wicket stand of 73 knocked the stuffing out of the West Indians. Hooper dropped Patel in the day's first over, and his team suffered painfully for it.

It all began sweetly and grew sour for Hooper. Cameron Cuffy's action-packed first over with the new ball earned him Harbhajan's wicket, with his score on 6.

Then Srinath took over. He bludgeoned seven fours and a six in 40 balls of pure mayhem in which both the MCC coaching manual and the bowling were ripped apart. At the other end, Patel oozed confidence, with vastly improved back-foot play earning him most of the 29 runs he added today. Patel fell three short of his first Test fifty, when his stylish but uppish square-cut was caught at point by Shivnarine Chanderpaul (353 for 8).

That the last three Indian wickets went down for five runs was small consolation for West Indies. Their bowling had again let India off the hook, in what could otherwise have been an even better day for them.

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