In Nagpur on Sunday afternoon England’s cricketers will have the chance to do something no England team have managed since 1985. The last time they won a limited-overs series in India, Vic Marks, now of these pages, took the wickets of Sunil Gavaskar, Dilip Vengsarkar and Kapil Dev en route to a decisive three-wicket win in Bangalore, only to have the man-of-the-match gong snatched away by Allan Lamb’s 59 not out in England’s chase.
The game has changed a bit since then. Whoever bats first in the second T20 international at the Vidarbha Cricket Association Stadium will have some vague hopes of getting close to India’s 46-over score of 205 all those years ago. Plus, of course, the current three-match T20 series is a different beast all round, 120 overs tacked on to the end of a gruelling two-legged winter tour that has by now left England’s players a little tired and hotel-sick, eager to simply get out there and get the series done.
Already there has been talk of something a little different to the boundary-crunching destruction of the past four white-ball games. For a start the boundaries in Nagpur are longer than they were at the quaint, lime-green oval of Green Park, Kanpur for the first T20 game. This is an impressive stadium, perhaps the biggest playing surface in the country. The India camp is understood to have told stadium staff to keep the boundaries out to 75 metres in every direction.
Local thinking suggests this might usher the leg-spinner Amit Mishra into the India team, forming a more attacking spin duo with Parvez Rasool on a pitch that has offered some turn in the past. There is also a chance the 19-year-old prodigy Rishabh Pant might get a game to add some spice to a slightly creaky middle order. Pant scored a violent 59 for India A against England in the last one-day warm-up game in Mumbai. In 16 first-class innings to date he has a mind-boggling 53 sixes.
England are expected to be unchanged, with David Willey unlikely to be risked and Eoin Morgan looking to his seam bowlers for more of the same. In the first T20 game on Thursday, Chris Jordan and Tymal Mills bowled with real control as England won by seven wickets, Jordan finding the fashionable ball du jour, the fifth‑stump off‑side yorker, at both ends of the innings.
“It’s a skill I’ve worked on very, very hard in the nets and in games,” Jordan said at the VCA on the eve of the game. “I just find with that wide yorker, bowling the ball outside the batsman’s eyeline, outside the batsman’s arc, there still has to be some precision with it, but that ball more often than not buys you some dots.”
Also joining up the dots in Kanpur was Mills, whose figures did not really reflect the control exercised over MS Dhoni in a key period at the end of India’s innings. His main tool was an excellent slower bouncer, released it with the same action, that takes up to 27mph off the ball, and left Dhoni groping at times. Mills also drew some purring reviews after the game from Morgan, heartened by his bowler’s willingness to attack and innovate.
Of the captain, Jordan said: “He tries to lead from the front in his language and his body language and everything he does and we just try to follow suit.” “You can see that with both the personnel and the way we play our cricket it’s very aggressive and on the front foot and I think that stems from the captain.”
For Jordan, a T20 specialist now with England – albeit against his own wishes – there is a further incentive to reproduce the accuracy of Kanpur. Jordan confirmed here that he, too, would be entering the Indian Premier League auction after this series, looking to trade on a fine season last year at Bangalore alongside Virat Kohli and KL Rahul.
“With Bangalore we made it to the final but obviously we couldn’t go that one step further,” he said. “Hopefully I’ll go back into the auction and get picked up.” In that final Jordan was run out in the last over as an all-star lineup fell just short chasing Sunrisers Hyderabad’s 208. Nagpur on Sunday is likely to be less of a run-gorge, but it could be just as close as England chase a rare white-ball high.
India (from): KL Rahul, M Pandey, V Kohli (c), Y Singh, MS Dhoni (wkt), S Raina, H Pandya, J Bumrah, A Mishrah, A Nehra, B Kumar, M Singh, Y Chalal, P Rasool, R Pant.
England (likely): J Roy, S Billings, J Root, E Morgan (c), B Stokes, J Buttler (wkt), M Ali, C Jordan, L Plunkett, A Rashid, T Mills.
Umpires A Chaudhary (Ind), CK Nandan (Ind).
