England wave adieu to victory as darkness descends

Lord's, first Test: India 201 & 282/9
drew with England 298 & 282

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ENGLAND were left rueing their luck after bad light and then rain denied them a deserved win over India today.

The hosts fell agonisingly short of success, narrowly failing to take the tenth Indian wicket to draw their fourth Lord's Test in a row having looked odds-on to go 1-0 up in the three-match series.

England skipper Michael Vaughan, however, refused to be downcast. "There were no complaints from me," he said. "If I had been on the batting side I would have wanted to go off because it was pretty dark.

"It has been a tough week for the players but we are looking forward to the next game, it's a great challenge playing against these Indians.

"India have a very skilled bowling attack, an experienced batting line-up and they play the game in the right spirit so it's going to be another good contest at Trent Bridge."

    

Not even the presence of Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe could lift the gloom, the boy wizard - who turned 18 today - unable to wave his wand and summon the sun out of its slumber.

It was left to Indian pin-up Mahendra Singh Dhoni to provide the fireworks, scoring an unbeaten 76 to save his country from defeat after England's inexperienced attack had reduced the tourists to 145 for five, to the relief of captian Rahul Dravid.

He said: "We just got out of jail here. There were some good efforts by the boys, but truly we were saved by the weather. England were on the front foot. We didn't start well, and they had us on the run for most of the game.

"We fought back well, and at various stages our seamers brought us back in, but we were lucky to get away in the end. We need to correct that in the next two games. Our batsmen have to get the runs so that our bowlers can get the 20 wickets.

"We'll look at what we've done in this game, have a couple of days of good nets and see how we do. I'd hope that we can keep improving from here. We have to utilise the lessons from this game."

Here is the full match scorecard from Cricinfo.