Fittingly, Gambhir's India get lost in the Fortis-verse

Nothing does irony quite like Test cricket.

- Barney Ronay

Say what you like about the world's most desiccated, Miss Havisham-ish team sport, out there trailing around the post-colonial world still dressed in its yellowing wedding dress. It's definitely got a sense of humour.

On day one of the fifth England-India Test this was expressed in cosmic terms, and a single bold and improbable dramatic arc.

Talk about groundsmen a lot. Tell groundsmen they're nothing. One thing is for sure. You're going to find yourself spending quite a lot of time watching groundsmen.

Or in this case watching the personage we must now refer to as controversial groundsman Lee Fortis, celebrity Oval pitch curator Lee Fortis, an otherwise peripheral figure with a name that sounds like an Anglo-Saxon burial site in Norfolk, but who was promoted in the buildup to this Test into an instrument of the sporting-political power struggle.

And so it came to pass in the first two sessions at the Oval, as India and England traipsed on and off between the showers, and Fortis loomed, somehow inevitably, centre stage. Here is Lee Fortis striding about his domain in classic shorts and boots combos, like a proud, captive bear. Here is Lee Fortis tugging at a tarpaulin.