Mike Selvey's verdict on the second day

England's Kevin Pietersen, left, watches India's Youvraj Singh, whom he dropped, take a run. Photograph: Jon Super/AP

Of all the clever things Kevin Pietersen has done on the field of play, dropping Yuvraj Singh was not high on the list. Yuvraj, his bete noire, the pie thrower who headed what was to become a queue of left-arm slow bowlers all itching to have a crack at him. He does not much care for Yuvraj and the feeling is mutual.

After a difficult morning, England had just got themselves back into the contest with the wickets, in short order, of the Tubby Titan and an apprehensive Suresh Raina when Yuvraj strode to the crease. Stuart Broad and Jimmy Anderson, adrenaline pumping now and their tails up, were in the mood. Yuvraj slashed at Broad and found the boundary. He tried again, made less convincing contact and steered the ball straight to Pietersen, who put down the catch.

Was he unsighted as the ball came out of a background of the sea of bodies in the New Stand? Perhaps. But it was one to be taken. Broad, ecstatic later, could scarcely contain his disappointment. That would have been 144 for five and on such moments hinge the outcome of matches.

Instead, shortly after tea, it was Rahul Dravid's deft angle to third man, with the new ball approaching, that gave India the lead and no further wicket had fallen. Their eventual partnership of 128, before Broad's remarkable intervention, was quite possibly the crucial one of what clearly will be a low-scoring match.

For two Test matches now, while all the talk has been of other things, it has been Dravid, the rock on which this Indian batting is built, who has held things together. At Lord's, he scored a beautiful century, a product not just of his skill and determination, but of the recent work he is said to have put in with Duncan Fletcher, an outstanding batting coach, when in the Caribbean.

If that had been an innings that might have defined his role within the team, then this century, scored in the Trent Bridge sunshine, was perhaps even more momentous. At Lord's he survived a catch in the slips and made England pay for it. This time, until he uppercut to third man as he tried to cash in with only the rabbits for company, he did not even give them a sniff. An innings utterly relentless, chanceless for hour upon hour, six hours and 10 minutes worth – a miracle in itself given the manner in which the ball still behaved, if not as malevolently as the first day when India bowled under cloud and it sang like a canary – then still capriciously for the seamers.

What he offered, for those who like to look beyond the mere statistical evidence of his achievement, was a masterclass in how to cope with the moving ball and certainly a different way to that which Pietersen had used during his masterful double hundred at Lord's.

There was Pietersen, an imposing figure, standing down the pitch to negate the swing of Kumar, and, placing himself on or outside offstump, in order to cover the away swing and work the leg side. India found themselves powerless such was his dominance.

And now here we had the slight figure of Dravid showing that a cat can be skinned in more ways than one. There are no extravagant movements or triggers from him, no forward press so beloved of his new tutor.

Instead he remains still as the bowler delivers, still but balanced and without being static: he is free to move as necessary. Yet somehow, he manages to play swing by staying leg side of the ball, his right foot, the anchor, rarely straying from the line of leg stump. So good is his judgement of line and length, so clever is he at reading the signs of the swing and the intentions of the bowlers, that he was able to leave the ball impeccably and play it late when not.

The structure of his innings tells its story. His first 50 runs, scored at a time when the going was at its toughest, took as many overs and came from 131 deliveries. Of these, 10 were hit to the boundary, there were two twos and half a dozen singles, which means that 113 balls were missed (content to play the line and not be drawn away from it, only once was he seduced into following the deviation in a way that brought his downfall in the second innings at Lord's), flagged through or played defensively. He waited his moment and scored in chosen areas, boundaries angled deftly, infuriatingly, to third man, that no-go area for England fielders. But more than half his runs came on the leg side, clipped away when the bowling strayed on to his pads. Scarcely anything that was not a long half-volley was played attackingly on the drive, for this, he reasoned, with the ball swinging, is not a driving pitch.

Then, with the ball soft, and the clouds banished, he changed the tempo of his game. His scoring rate increased, but his boundary count was slashed.

With Yuvraj, there were runs to be collected in ones and twos as the seamers faded and, with the new ball in mind, Strauss turned to Pietersen and Graeme Swann, treated with some disdain. The leg glance that took him to three figures, from a further 78 deliveries, was only his third boundary since his half-century.

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