Jadeja's subtle evolution boosts Kohli's options

He stifles you with his accuracy, turns balls sharply past edges, beats the inside edges with straighter ones, gets them to kick at left-hand batsmen, takes their edges with balls that don't turn, but there is one mode of dismissal that Ravindra Jadeja is not often given credit for: caught on the drive.

Quite expectedly, 46 of Jadeja's 104 wickets are either bowled or lbw. Three of the six stumpings off his bowling have come through sharp turn. Add 32 of the 52 catches that are either inside, outside or top edges caught by the wicketkeeper, slips, short legs or silly points, and you are left with 23 caught wickets that are not typical Jadeja wickets. Many of these 23 are slogs or inexplicable shots from tailenders.

Right-hand batsmen generally tend to keep their pads away from him, and don't mind driving him, unlike say R Ashwin or even a legspinner. On pitches that are not turning, and early on in Tests, it is considered easy to line him up and play him like a seam bowler. Ashwin, for example, is not that easy to drive because he gets the ball to dip and drift. Jadeja is considered dangerous when the ball is turning from the centre of the pitch. In this series, though, on two occasions, on day-one pitches, Jadeja has displayed he can get batsmen out caught at short cover.

On the surface, caught at short cover looks like an innocuous dismissal, but it involves getting the ball to dip out of the batsman's reach. In Mohali, Jos Buttler had been part of a 69-run partnership on a good opening-day pitch when he chipped one to short cover. He had left the crease to play a drive, but failed to dispatch this Jadeja delivery. On day one in Chennai, with England in a much better position, and Jonny Bairstow one short of a half-century, Jadeja again created the gap between the bat and the pitch of the ball.

Jadeja will continue to be a spinner who relies on not giving batsmen time to recover, but as his career has grown he has become more adept at changing his pace and trajectory. In this series he has got the batsmen to drive him more. When he had Ben Stokes stumped in Mohali, he didn't do it with turn, but with drift. The movement outside the crease then was brought about by the pressure he had built through tight bowling. Here, too, Bairstow had scored five runs in the last 19 balls before he felt he could drive when he saw the ball in the air.

Before he removed Bairstow, Jadeja had extended his domination of the England captain Alastair Cook, taking the opener's wicket for the fifth time in this series. Apart from an uncharacteristic stumping in Mumbai, each of the other four wickets have involved persistence and subtlety. Cook has looked to get across to cover Jadeja's quick turn, but Jadeja has kept drawing him wider millimetre by millimetre before bowling slightly straighter: it can't be too much turn because then the ball can't both impact within the stumps and also go on to hit them.

In Chennai, the natural variation came into play, with Cook playing for the turn. There was no giveaway this was going straight, and the edge was taken at slip. Again, though, Cook was not to the pitch of the ball, which is why the natural variation came into play. The Buttler and Bairstow dismissals, and the Cook ones through the series, demand a lot of persistence and patience, and are less reliant on the pitch.

At the least they depend on maximising the effect of the assistance from the pitch, which happens if you beat the batsmen in the air. That Jadeja is doing so is a facet of his game he didn't need to show on the more helpful pitches. He has always maintained that he just focuses on being accurate and bowling fast when the pitch is doing the job for him. In this series the pitches haven't done that much for the spinners, and also India have been asked to bowl first on four occasions. Jadeja might average 31.10 this series, but he has responded well to his first real extended test from the conditions.

Jadeja has taken 12 of England's 34 wickets in the first innings of a match. Only nine of Ashwin's 27 wickets this series have come in the first innings of the match. Statistically he is a slow starter into a match, with numbers saying he takes 14 overs on an average to claim his first wicket. When he does get into the groove, though, he can run through sides. Until such a time arrives, though, it is Jadeja who has provided Virat Kohli the control he needs, with not just his accuracy but also subtlety.