Marcus Trescothick admitted that a draw would be a good result for England after India put themselves in a dominant position in the second Test at Edgbaston.
England will resume on day five still needing 536 runs to pull off a world-record run chase of 608 but with just seven wickets intact after India removed Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett and Joe Root on the fourth evening.
‘Whenever the situation is challenging, of course it (draw) is (a good result),’ said Trescothick.
‘We’re not stupid enough to understand that you have to win or lose – there are three results in a game but we have done some things in our time that show we’re different to what’s been done before,’ the England batting coach added.
But Trescothick insisted there would be no talk of playing for a draw within the dressing room.
‘We don’t use that sort of language but we’re not naive enough to know that it’s a very challenging total. Do you just go in your bunker and dig it out? Some players may do that,’ he said. ‘We’re always trying to be as positive as we can.
England will resume still needing 536 runs to beat India in the second Test at Edgbaston
Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett and Joe Root all fell on the fourth evening during a mammoth chase
England batting coach Marcus Trescothick admitted a draw would be a good result
‘We appreciate that it is a hell of a lot of runs to try and score. I don’t think we’ve seen scoring rates quite that quick in a day, so of course it will be challenging. But we’ve probably about another 10 to 15 overs of the balls at the hardest point before it gets soft, and then we’ll see how we’re going from that point, really.’
Meanwhile, Morne Morkel, the India bowling coach, insisted they weren’t worried about England potentially chasing down the target despite a curiously late declaration by Shubman Gill, with some showers forecast for Sunday.
‘Worried? Not really,’ he said. ‘If a team scores 500 plus on the final day then they deserve to win,’ Morkel added.
‘It’s definitely going to be an exciting day of cricket. Harry Brook said in the media that they’re going to chase or go at everything or anything that we set for them. They’re attacking players. That’s the brand of cricket they want to play.
‘They probably might have a go at it for a while and then reassess, but I think we are in for an exciting day of cricket.’
As of Saturday evening, Edgbaston have sold 15,000 tickets for day five, with tickets priced at £25 for adults and £5 for juniors.