Despite Sam Curran’s heroics with the bat, England narrowly failed to chase down a target of 330 in Pune
So England leave India, or not in the case of the IPL stars, empty-handed. They lost the Tests 3-1, the T20s 2-1, and the ODIs 2-1. But they took all of those series deep, as the players say, and they have emerged with some credit from all three. India had to play fantastically well to beat them. “You’ve got to remember,” says Nasser Hussain, “India is a blooming hard place to tour.” And they had all the trouble of the bubble to deal with too. If we were in the stadium in Pune, they’d be doing a lap of honour, and we’d be giving them a big round of applause. Honour feels like the right word.
Time to wrap things up. Thanks for reading, for writing in if you did so, and for being excellent company. It’s been a treat. We’ll be back in May for England’s home internationals. And guess who’s coming over later in the summer? Yes, it’s India. By then, we may even be able to go to a game.
And the winning captain, as we know, is Virat Kohli. “When the top two teams battle against each other,” he says, “you’re going to get very exciting games, and that was the case again tonight. We knew it was going to be a tough game, England’s not going to throw in the towel at any stage. Sam played a really good innings to keep them in the hunt, but our bowlers kept taking wickets and made sure that we put enough pressure on them, to make sure they got over the line. The mindset shifted very quickly in the last couple of overs, and I think Hardik and Natu [Natarajan] did brilliant to finish it off.” And the dropped catches? “It’s part of cricket. There’s no lack of intent, and that’s all you want as a captain.”
Kohli is “quite surprised” that Shardul Thakur wasn’t the Man of the Match. His consolation prize is finishing with the most wickets in the series – seven, one more than his mates Bhuvi and Prasidh, and two more than Mark Wood.
