If yesterday was a sobering day for England, today the hangover followed. Sachin Tendulkar has often been compared to Don Bradman, and today when 404 for 3 ticked over on the scoreboard it was like Headingley 1948 all over again, when Bradman's Invincibles posted that score to humble England on the final day. This time the humbling came on the second day. Rahul Dravid purred to a classical 148. Sourav Ganguly flicked and flashed to a century of his own. Tendulkar rarely looked troubled, except for a brief patch when he lost focus in the eighties. And the bowling was uninspired.

Andy Caddick was all over the place. Was it all those replays of That Over in 2000, when he took four West Indian wickets and ensured the match would be over inside two days? Maybe he had been hypnotised into thinking that all you had to do at Headingley was run up and plonk the ball somewhere near the stumps at the other end. Whatever, it didn't work for him today.

And it didn't work for Nasser Hussain either, despite a lot of head-scratching and what was possibly a record number of bowling changes (sorry, the Wisden Wizard can't work that one out yet). Matthew Hoggard briefly threatened, and by and large stuck to a consistent line and length. But the others didn't contain. Even Ashley Giles's infamous leg-stump line was milked: perhaps Tendulkar has been taking lessons from Virender Sehwag, who couldn't understand what all the fuss was about in India and sashayed down the pitch to belt Giles through mid-on. Tendulkar sachined rather than sashayed, but the result was the same. He didn't do it too often, though, as if the whole thing was beneath him really.

As this Headingley pitch continues to act as if it had been made in India and dropped in, the turn which Giles extracted to dismiss Dravid was more bad news for Hussain & Co. Ganguly has both Harbhajan Singh and Anil Kumble at his disposal. England are going to have to bat awfully well to get out of this one.

Steven Lynch is database director of Wisden.com.

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