Former England captain Nasser Hussain slammed India's bizarre ball change request early on the second day of the Lord’s Test on Friday. India's Test captain Shubman Gill made a request for a ball change to the umpires, despite Indian pacers making the second new ball talk and move to their tunes, with England batters struggling to negotiate it. Jasprit Bumrah, the team's ace pacer, broke the resistance of Joe Root and Ben Stokes after the duo had taken England past the 250-run mark for four wickets on the first day of the Test.

Bumrah first castled Stokes with a sharp nip-backer before having Root, who had scored a hundred, drag one back onto the stumps. He then snipped Chris Woakes out first ball - all within a span of 12 deliveries in his fiery spell.

Gill took a fresh Dukes ball at 80.1 overs overnight. Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj even troubled wicketkeeper Jamie Smith early on before he was dropped by KL Rahul in the slips. But surprisingly, captain Gill pleaded for a ball change around the 90th over before the umpires granted the request. Later, the Indian players appeared unhappy with the quality of the red ball offered to them.

Mohammed Siraj was the first to express his displeasure. “Is this a 10-over-old ball? Seriously?” he was heard saying on the stump mic, with the nature of the ball even leaving the commentators perplexed.

Hussain said India’s request for a new ball backfired, as Smith and seamer Brydon Carse went on to score half-centuries. England moved up from 271 for seven to 387 all out, adding 116 more runs for the last three wickets.

“It was a very odd ball change from India. There are two reasons you change a cricket ball. One is because the umpires think it’s gone out of shape, or two, because the bowling attack and the captain realise that the ball is doing nothing and you try and get the umpires to change it," said Hussain.

“The ball was doing everything this morning. The ball they had, for 63 deliveries, was zipping round corners. Bumrah was going through a magic spell. Siraj, at the other end, was having catches dropped. The ball was carrying through to the wicketkeeper. It was doing everything. It was doing more than at any stage in the Test match," he observed.

“I cannot work out why you’d want to change a ball that was doing this much — sixty-three deliveries of the ball zipping round,” the former England skipper continued. “Not only did they want it changed, but the captain got really animated when they didn’t change it. I thought it was one of the most bizarre decisions.

“You’ve got a ball in your hand that’s doing a lot. We all know these Dukes balls are variable. He’s still on the umpire about the ball change. Now maybe he’s having a word with the umpires about, ‘this ball isn’t as good as the last one’. But that’s the problem with trying to change the ball, which is that if you’ve got a good one, stick with it. I thought it was a really odd thing for a) India to do, and then b) to get really animated, and now c) to say, well, the ball we got is no good. Don’t change the good one.”

Former India wicketkeeper Dinesh Karthik said Bumrah was not ready for Gill's move to take the new ball. “A bit odd, considering how much that ball was moving — probably the most in this Test match, and consistently as well. They delivered 63 balls with it and quite a few of them moved. So, I don’t know what the conversation was. It felt like [Mohammed] Siraj initiated that and Shubman was there. Bumrah looked like he wasn’t ready for it to be changed, but it happened,” said Karthik.