India stumbles to their largest T20I defeat as they get blown away by Archer and Tongue
England – 201/7 (Phil Salt 70 (44 balls), Sam Curran 41 (24 balls), Prince Yadav 30/2) win against India – 76 (Jofra Archer 29/3, Josh Tongue 28/4)
England win by 125 runs – Man of the Match – Jofra Archer
Shreyas Iyer’s captaincy nightmare extended further as India remained winless after the 3rd T20 between India and England in Nottingham. On a good batting surface with just enough for the pacers, England fought it out to post a credible score of 201/7. For India, though, the fight went missing. Perseverance and adaptability appear to be forgotten words in Indian cricket nowadays. A player who knows only one way to play, who starts hitting sixes from ball one, is celebrated, but the ability to soak up the pressure and put it back on the opposition seems to have disappeared the moment Kohli retired from T20Is.
Face to face with their largest defeat ever in terms of runs, some of the players would do well to learn from the English approach, as the English batsmen also struggled initially. Being put into bat after losing the toss, the first over was a maiden as Arshdeep extracted prodigious swing with the new ball.
The wicket clearly favoured the fielding side with the new ball. Which is why it was inexplicable why Harshit Rana started bowling his slower balls with the fielding restrictions in place, and a spinner was introduced as early as the third over. Jos Buttler may have been short of runs in international cricket recently, but he is too experienced and good a batsman to let this go unpunished. His 36 in 21 balls was one of the reasons why England did not find themselves in a hole by the end of the powerplay.
Prine Yadav, one of the few Indian players to escape unscathed from this match, cut short Buttler’s innings with a splendid leg stump yorker. Soon after, he had Harry Brook caught, trying to hit a hard length ball over deep square leg. Some nervy running followed as Phil Salt struggled to time the ball, but England somehow escaped to the halfway mark with 8 wickets intact.
Shivam Dube had just bowled a decent over, which was ruined by an edged boundary, but he was immediately taken off. The pitch had nothing much for the spinners, and Varun started bowling as if he knew it. Had he taken a longer run-up, a casual observer might have easily mistaken him for a medium pacer. A half tracker dispatched over deep midwicket got Salt going. Before this ball, he was on 17 in 19 balls. He eventually finished on 70 off 44 balls and was the top scorer in the match.
Playing on tracks heavily favouring the batsmen has seemingly taken away all the confidence from the Indian bowlers. Even on a track that had something for bowlers willing to bend their backs, they appeared stunned, with no intent of attacking the batsmen and happy to finish their quota with 10 runs per over. Pacers bowling slower balls on track where there was early swing and hard lengths were not easy to put away, and spinners just darting the ball without any guile was not a pretty sight.
Harshit Rana got rid of the dangerous Bethell and Banton in consecutive deliveries in the 12th over. Both were pace on deliveries, perhaps something that the Indian bowlers should take note of. At 111/4 in the 12th over, both sides had reasons to be optimistic. Sam Curran came in and played a blinder as Salt also started opening up.
Arshdeep, who was so good in the initial overs, soon lost his line and started bowling leg side and was duly punished. Axar started firing it in and was taken for 3 sixes in the 17th over. The one ball in the over that he bowled slower and wider was rewarded with the wicket of Phil Salt. Prince should have had another wicket, but Harshit Rana put down a relatively easy chance. Nevertheless, he finished with a credible 30/2 in 4 overs.
A couple of run outs in the last over couldn’t stop England from scoring 201/7. At the halfway mark, experts were arguing whether the total would be adequate. Little did they know what was to come. Contrary to the approach of Indian pacers, the English fast bowlers were under no misconception of the way they would go about things. Plus, they had something that the Indians did not: extreme pace. In Jofra Archer and Josh Tongue they had the bowlers who could extract good bounce from the surface and discomfit the batsmen.
The Indian innings started confidently enough as Abhishek Sharma opened with Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. 3 sixes in the first 9 balls, and the innings seemed to be on its way. At this stage in their innings, England had scored their first run. Abhishek was the first to go as he mistimed a slash to the deep point boundary. Some extra bounce then did the trick for Sooryavanshi as he got strangled by a short ball from Archer to glove behind to the keeper.
The two English pacers were bowling well in the mid-140s, and the batsmen simply had no answer. Ishan Kishan, just after having pulled Tongue for a six, appeared to have middled another one, but hit straight to the deep square leg fielder. Shreyas Iyer then nailed a flick to a leg-side half-volley straight to the deep backward square leg fielder, not unlike how he was dismissed in the 1st T20I match vs Ireland in the previous series. Archer was the fortunate bowler this time, but looking at how well he had bowled, he thoroughly deserved that bit of luck.
At 41/4, India was staring down the barrel. In contrast to India, England never let go of the pressure. Archer was bowling his 3rd over within the powerplay and accounted for Axar Patel soon as the batsman edged behind to the keeper. Inexplicably, Axar was promoted above Tilak Verma, and Shivam Dube had to come at 8. Amid all the carnage, the Indian think tank struggled to get a left-right combination going, seemingly forgetting that they had only one right-hander in the top 7. And that they had dropped the other one from the starting 11.
It could all have been very entertaining if it were not so infuriating. It was hard to make sense of any of it at all. By the time the spinners came to the attack, half the side was back in the dugout, and the only specialist batsman remaining was the one who had often struggled against spin. With the team in a dire position, this struggle grew more intense.
Taking the strike and not being able to rotate it back, Tilak Varma grew desperate and predictably stepped out to offspinner Will Jacks, more in hope than expectation and was left stranded outside the crease. Buttler almost made a mess of the simple stumping chance, but just about managed to break the stumps before letting go of the ball. Tilak’s painful innings of 3 in 11 balls was a reminder of the limitations in his game currently and the scrambled thinking of the team management. The best way forward may be to work on the deficiencies, rather than change one’s position hoping for the best possible matchups.
Once Dube fell to another hard length ball from Tongue, the match was over as a contest, and the only possible motivation for the tail enders would have been to overcome India’s lowest-ever T20I score of 74. They managed to surpass that, but only just as India folded for 76 with 50 balls remaining. Archer and Tongue shared 7 wickets between themselves as Adil Rashid helped himself to a couple. The stunned crowd and the Indian team could scarcely believe what was unfolding before them. The highest score anyone in the Indian lineup managed was just 13.
The English bowlers were just as surprised as anyone else at the manner in which the Indian batting began to collapse. They came expecting a tight contest and experienced a capitulation of massive proportions from their opponents.
The earlier Ireland matches may have been an aberration, with the team struggling to adjust to different conditions. Even the last match was closely fought, before one bad over cost India the match. But today’s encounter was a proper group failure, with the batsmen having to take the majority of the blame. And of course, the team leadership and coaching staff.
The Ireland and England tour has laid bare several of their deficiencies, namely: The inability to read pitches and conditions, the batsmen’s and bowlers’ failure to adapt, the atrocious fielding display across several matches. The list may go on, but these are all factors that have led to India remaining winless across 5 matches so far. When a spinner starts bowling no balls repeatedly, someone is clearly not doing their job properly.
With the chance of winning the series gone and a new captain at the helm, the next two matches could very well define the direction Indian cricket takes for the crucial next two years. Salvage the series, and things might go back to normal, but two, or even one more defeat, might just result in some kind of overhaul. With the way the team is performing, that may not be the worst thing in the world.