A spectacular all-round performance from India, whose excellence with both bat and ball was personified by Hardik Pandya becoming their first player to score a half-century and take four wickets in the same game, consigned England to a crushing defeat in their first match since Eoin Morgan’s international retirement.
The Jos Buttler era started as Morgan’s had ended: with the captain getting a duck. His wicket inside the opening over represented the most miserable start possible to England’s attempt to chase 199, a target they have successfully reached only three times in this format, and despite benefiting from some good luck and several dropped catches they ended up falling 50 runs short. “We’ve been outplayed today,” Buttler said. “India bowled fantastically well with the new ball, they put us under a lot of pressure and we couldn’t get back in the game.”
From the start Bhuvneshwar Kumar and the debutant Arshdeep Singh had the ball swinging extravagantly – a feat the home side never managed – and bewitched English batters fell with a frequency more recently associated with Conservative ministers.
Liam Livingstone also went without scoring, attempting a scoop and gloving a catch to Dinesh Karthik behind the stumps. Dawid Malan, the one English batter to find a semblance of form in the early overs, had been cleaned up a couple of balls previously.
A measure of England’s discomfort was the fact that when Jason Roy was dismissed just after the conclusion of the powerplay, caught after edging the ball in a high arc towards third man, he had scored only four runs from 16 deliveries. A player whose career strike rate is 141.6, and who had never previously gone at less than 60 when he had scored at all, this time went at just 25.
At this point England were 33 for four, while at the same stage of their innings India had been 66 for two, and their position already looked forlorn.
Buttler’s first big calls had seen him fill the Morgan-shaped hole in the batting order with Harry Brook, and the Adil Rashid-sized gap in the bowling unit with Matt Parkinson. Brook showed some of the promise he has consistently displayed for Yorkshire and hit some impressive shots in his 23-ball 28, and his 61-run partnership with Moeen Ali was England’s best by a distance.
Parkinson meanwhile bowled bravely if not particularly cheaply – though given the ferocity with which India attacked that was a failing he shared with most of his teammates. Only Chris Jordan, whose bowling particularly at the death has been much criticised of late but whose four overs here cost just 23 runs and brought two wickets, emerged from the mauling with reputation in any way enhanced.
Having won the toss and chosen to bat, India’s attacking intent was evident from the start. Rohit Sharma had recovered from the Covid that kept him out of the Test at Edgbaston to lead the side and open the batting, and he proved that his appetite for cricket was undimmed by feasting on the opening overs, facing 14 of the first 18 deliveries of the game and sending five of them to the rope.
He was already well on his way when Moeen was brought on to bowl the third over, presumably to exploit a promising match-up against Ishan Kishan, but Ishan worked his first ball for a single and that left Rohit to tuck in. Twice in succession he swept Moeen behind square for four, but the next was edged into Buttler’s gloves and the theme for India’s innings, of rapid scoring regularly but never catastrophically interrupted by falling wickets, was set.
That brought in Deepak Hooda, who had been outstanding during India’s T20s games in Ireland last month and seamlessly carried that form into this match. His second and third deliveries, bowled by Moeen, were both sent screaming over long-on for six – one of them crashing into Sky’s commentary cart where Morgan, in his unfamiliar new microphone-wielding role, ducked for cover – and he followed that by milking Reece Topley for a trio of boundaries in the next over.
Hooda ended with 33 from 17 deliveries, while Suryakumar Yadav more than kept pace at the other end with 39 off 19 including two beautifully timed sixes off Tymal Mills. Compared with them, Pandya’s 33-ball 51 was positively pedestrian, but India consistently averaged 10 or more an over until the end of the 17th, whereupon England mounted something of a late-innings fightback to keep their opponents’ total below 200. Their target looked daunting but potentially achievable – though not, it transpired, for very long.
