Right, so the lovely Croatians knocked over England after extra time putting the obnoxious IT’S COMING HOME stuff to bed yesterday. What this also means is that to forget the World Cup, the English will probably head to cricket for the rest of the summer. Sadly for them though, even their cricket team’s picking up Ls.
If you read my last recap piece, I talked about how England and Ireland will be swept away by India after we won the first three games of our tour. Admittedly, I had gotten a bit carried away. I’d also started trembling after England won the second T20 and brought India vs England T20 series back to life. However, when India won the third game, and the series with that, I was refilled with confidence and bad ‘England is sh*t’ jokes. Anyway, let’s talk about how the games actually went down.
Hales to the Rescue
Now this game actually took place in Wales, and not in England, meaning that India had the chance to win three successive games in three different parts of the British Isles. That didn’t happen though, because the Indian top order forgot how to bat. Rohit Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan, and KL Rahul made a total of 21 runs in 29 balls combined, as India got off to a bad start.
Captain Virat Kohli actually stepped up to the plate for a change and made 47 runs, the highest for an Indian on the day. This innings came as a relief to the Indians, as Kohli had been terrible in the previous three matches. Runs in the 30s and 20s by MS Dhoni and Suresh Raina respectively meant that India got to somewhat of a respectable total of 148 runs.
England made hard work of the total too, due to their top order also forgetting how to face more than 12 balls. Roy and Buttler went off for 15 and 14 in 12 balls, whereas Joe root made 9 off 10. Alex Hales came to the English rescue though, his fifty coupled with a good Jonny Bairstow innings got England over the line with two balls to spare. The series was level, India vs England just got interesting.
RoHIT RoHIT RoHIT
If there’s a chant or term/phrase worse than ITS COMING HOME, it’s when Rohit Sharma is called RoHIT or HITman or whatever. The man has one good inning in 20 games but he’s still called RoHIT. However, in the third T20, Rohit actually lived up to his nickname as he hit a century.
England batted first in the T20, and this time their top order was world class. Big Jos Buttler made a quick 34, Hales hit 30, and Jason Roy was the top scorer due to his amazing knock off 67 in 31 balls. Apart from those three though, the highest score by an England batter was the 25 Jonny Bairstow made. In the end, England made 198 for the loss of 9 wickets, and they probably could have made over 210-220 if the middle order didn’t fall like a house of cards.
India somehow got over the line in just 18.4 overs and lost only three wickets. In fact, we even made 2 runs extra! Rohit Sharma smashed the English all over the park on his way to a century, whereas Kohli was good once again and made 43 runs. A crazy Hardik Pandya cameo which saw him make 33 runs in just 14 deliveries sealed the series as India cruised to a win.
Now there’s a few ODIs, the first of which starts minutes after I finish writing this article, and hopefully, all of them go India’s favour so I can make some terrible jokes in the next edition of this series.
