How not to use the DRS

Betting houses will give you odds on anything, but you cannot be sure if they would have accepted bets on the first talking point of the DRS on the first day of its use in a Test in India being its non-use. It has been a long wait for the review system's Test debut in India, and it has come with all the bells and whistles in place, including letting the viewers at home have a listen-in. You would have expected it to arrive with a bang, and it did - through its conspicuousness.

Alastair Cook had enjoyed all the luck until then: won the first toss in a Test where Virat Kohli has flicked the coin in India, then enjoyed two dropped catches in the first two overs after deciding to bat. Having survived the first hour, having just begun to look comfortable, Cook missed one from Ravindra Jadeja. It was a shortish delivery, it spun past his inside edge and hit him in front of leg. At first look it seemed it was headed down leg, but Cook followed the protocol teams have in place: ask the non-striker, unless you have hit the ball.

Cook did ask Haseeb Hameed, the 19-year-old debutant, the youngest player to open the innings for England on debut. You have to admire a team space where such a rookie can tell the captain, the most-capped England player, to walk off, but Cook would have realised his error soon after, watching replays inside the dressing room.

Hameed was not done dealing with the DRS. Soon he was trapped in front off the bowling of R Ashwin. This was a length ball from around the wicket that turned back just enough to be hitting the stumps but not enough to hit the defensive bat. This time, though, the vice-captain Joe Root encouraged Haseeb to ask for the review. Challenges remaining: 1.

India made their first use of DRS minutes before tea, at the end of a wicketless session. The ball was reversing, Root had planted his front foot across, and Umesh Yadav had swung it past his inside edge. This one looked a really good candidate for lbw, but Kumar Dharmasena ruled it to be not out. India understandably reviewed it. Ball tracking said the ball was hitting the leg stump as much as it could without getting the decision overturned. Root was on 92 then, and successfully went on to become the first batsman visiting India to score a century since Michael Clarke in February 2013.

Dharmasena, whom DRS had given a lot of grief in Bangladesh, could relax. It was DRS 0 - Dharmasena 2.