Slings and arrows Agony for Woakes and England as India edge victory in thriller

Barney Ronay at the Kia Oval sees the dramatic climax of a six-run win to draw the series 2-2 and asks: are you not wrung out, frazzled and wowed?

- Barney Ronay

Well, that was something new. Have you ever seen the one-armed man running a bye to the keeper while 20,000 people leap and writhe and hold their heads and the man shouts in agony? Have you ever seen figures picked out in silhouette at the top of the stand, posed in perfect shapes of triumph, dread and fear because another gobbet of time has passed, another dot, because essentially nothing has happened?

Have you ever seen the one-armed man walk down and prod the middle of the wicket between balls, like this is just another cricket day, and had to swallow a snort of disbelief at the extreme cinematic weirdness of this snapshot in time?

At times such as these, immersed in the super-heated bubble at the final day at the Oval, all of this stuff undeniably happening but also basically nothing, a story told only to itself, you do wonder how you'd explain it to someone from Denmark. Words such as nuance, post-colonial, will, protocol gabbled out while the person from Denmark nods politely. Wait. Geopolitics! Hunger! Umpire's call! And all expressed through 25 days of the most stiffly choreographed sporting activity ever devised. This is a game that takes place in trousers. It's a dance around a semi-invisible dark red ball.

Two hours after the final notes at the Oval all that was left on one of the upper staircases in the stand at the Vauxhall End was a single abandoned black leather slip-on shoe with an empty carton of snus balanced on top of it, and you thought, yeah, that seems about right. At the end of which India did definitely win here by six runs.

On a grey and smudged south London morning, the Oval felt like a mini-Glastonbury before play. All the notes were here, the hum, the crackle, the shouts, the Indian section in the stands rising to wave at Dinesh Karthik as he marched across this sallow old lime green oval like a presidential candidate.