Hardik Pandya got his revenge. In the first innings, he heard the death rattle after smacking Adil Rashid for consecutive sixes over long-off. It was the perfect cap-off to the leg-spinner’s quota; the drift and deception lacerating Hardik’s aura points, to borrow a Gen Z slang. Now it was Rashid’s turn to witness the mockery of his furniture as he chopped on a length ball to leave the medium pacer smirking.
With his dismissal England’s scorecard read a sorry 175/8, having lost 6/49 in the middle overs to bungle up their response to 356, the second-highest ODI total in Ahmedabad. It wasn’t a one-off implosion though; breakdowns have tailgated England’s savage starts throughout the series, a key separator between the teams as India have ceded five less wickets to the visitors’ 16 in overs 11-40 while scoring 187 more runs. This is a twofold issue, for England’s spin attack is feeble as compared to India and their batters simply lack the range to change gears, an imperative for success in the subcontinent.
Mark Wood and Saqib Mahmood pitched 78% of their balls in the ideal 4-8m zone in what were an eventful first ten overs. Rohit Sharma was squared up by a 140kmph pearler that swung away 2.4 degrees, and Phil Salt thought of pouching the nick with one hand before realising it was too prized a scalp to be applying mayo to his dive. Shubman Gill stepped out of his crease to counter the movement while Virat Kohli played and missed on occasions, craving a feel of the ball as usual. Though India managed to keep the scoreboard ticking with confident strokeplay, even showing enterprise at times like when Kohli picked up a ball from outside the off-stump and wristily flicked it into the 23m gap, England had been equal protagonists in the battle of the PowerPlay.
The pressure ought to be sustained, given the vulnerability factor as Kohli was short on runs, but the introduction of Joe Root was precisely the fire exit the right-handers were looking for. 24 runs came off his first two overs, leading India to a capillary wave of momentum that Gill rode on to bash Gus Atkinson and become the fastest to 2,500 ODI runs. It simply wasn’t the stage to buy a few cheap overs, and the tactical misjudgement from Jos Buttler saw England squander control at a make-or-break juncture of the Indian innings.
Root bowled all over the place, inviting a neat glance and a signature horizontal-bat drive from Kohli and a tonk over short mid-wicket from Gill. He returned an economy of 9.4 in his five overs while the other part-timer, Liam Livingstone, was only marginally better, conceding 0/57 in eight overs. The dearth of support rendered Rashid a lone warrior in the bid to stifle India who, as per recent form, have their fair share of problems against spin. The Sri Lanka tour in August 2024 where tweakers took 27 out of their 30 wickets stands out in that regard.
The chinks in the armour notwithstanding, two successive deliveries in the 17th over demonstrated why India are renowned as excellent negotiators of spin. Rashid’s pace has, rather astoundingly, ran the gamut from 60kmph to 100kmph on this white-ball assignment, and the first of the aforementioned pair was at the slower end of the spectrum. It drew Kohli forward on the leg-stump line, but the length was not full enough to drive so Kohli waited on it, let the ball turn and tucked it around the corner. The placement of the gentle dab was so accurate that by the time the fielder at short mid-wicket could swoop in, the strike was rotated.
The next ball was polar opposite, a flipper that much to Rashid’s chagrin, was ill-directed. Gill read the variation out of the hand and detected the change in trajectory, transferring his weight on the backfoot in a flash to execute a backfoot slap. It is this technical and tactical receptivity, acquired over the years through experiential learning, to the different challenges and game situations that sets the Indian approach apart in the middle phase, when spinners bowl the bulk of overs. Another example of this multidimensionality was served by Shreyas Iyer as he found the fence via both a lofted drive and a cheeky tap-on-the-head in Wood’s second spell.
‘’Shubman and Virat laid a great platform and that helped me to excel. I wish I could have got a hundred.’’ Shreyas Iyer remarked. ‘’The break I got in between where I was working with the domestic team helped and I also got opportunity to work on my technique as well and especially the drop-in shots which got me singles, it’s not about cuts and pulls all the time, it’s the balls close to the body when you get singles and that’s more satisfying for me.’’
England have the power, unorthodoxy, and flair to move the game along but the constructive half of their batsmanship is woefully weak. Fresh off a productive ILT20 season in the United Arab Emirates, Tom Banton dazzled with his reverse-swept maximums but lacked the mental resources to decipher which way Kuldeep Yadav was going to turn the ball and defend accordingly to hold his ground. Liam Livingstone walked in to bat in the 25th over with England struggling at 154/5, needing 203 runs to win off 155 balls, an arduous task considering the damage but still not an insurmountable one as the tourists bat deep. He played 17 dots in his 23-ball stay before getting stumped in what turned out to be another boom-or-bust episode.
With the Champions Trophy looming, a renaissance for the trendsetters of this format is increasingly starting to feel like a pipedream. Since the start of the 2023 ODI World Cup where England won only three out of nine matches, Buttler and his men have been defeated in 16 out of the 23 ODIs they contested in. There is little variety among their pace quartet, the spin department begs for depth, and the habit of sprinkling sensibility on top of sheer aggression is taking forever to inculcate within the batting group. It is a bit ironic that the young Jacob Bethell provided a case in point with his measured half-century in Nagpur after England lost three wickets in a space of seven balls following an opening stand worth 75.
India, on the other hand, are primed for glory, having reached the 2017 final in the tournament’s last staging. Not least because their experienced campaigners are back in form.
