The Indian cricket team faced another humiliating defeat outside the subcontinent as England beat them 3-1 after going down 0-1 in the second Test at Lord’s.
England have finally won a series after one year and broken the jinx of a win-less streak of 10 matches, following a 5-0 Ashes whitewash in Australia and a first home series defeat against Sri Lanka.
England players improved their performance match by match and fought back, especially after Lords’ defeat. They won the last two Tests, at the Old Trafford and The Oval, in only three days.
In the Test series it was a contest between the English seam bowlers and the Indian famed batting, especially between James Anderson and Virat Kohli, which was won by Anderson as he dismissed Kohli four times in the five Tests and didn’t allow him to score a single fifty.
Kohli’s complete failure was a huge factor in India’s performance as he scored only 134 runs in 10 innings.
The Test series result showed that the Indian players are now only fit to play 20-overs cricket like IPL as their mental and physical strengths are not up to the standard of five-day matches.
After the shameful defeat, Indian captain M S Dhoni is under fire. His defensive strategy and regular changing in team combination is being widely criticised.
Under Dhoni, India have won only two of 20 overseas Tests since the 2011 World Cup they won.
Now the Indian captain is on the edge of equaling an embarrassing record of maximum number of away Test defeats. Former New Zealand captain Stephen Fleming and West Indian skipper Brian Lara with 16 overseas Test losses have the worst record among international skippers.
Dhoni, after the defeat in the last Test at Manchester, now has 13 away Test defeats as a captain.
But Dhoni’s own contribution with the bat saved his captaincy at least for the One-day International series against England. He may get another chance in the home series against the West Indies and even in Australia.
The Indian management tried all options to stop English batsmen in this recent series but failed to restrict them. Changes in the bowling line-up after every defeat also affected the bowlers’ performance.
Only Bhuvneshwar Kumar managed to play all the five Tests. Ravindra Jadeja played four Tests. Ishant Sharma, who was the Man-of-the-Match for India’s Lords’ Test win, missed third and fourth Tests due to injury.
Mohammed Shami, who played the first three Tests, failed to impress in favourable circumstances and was dropped for the last two matches. Binny, who replaced Jadeja as the all-rounder, remained ineffective in both departments.
On the other hand, England made only two changes to their bowling unit after the defeat at Lord’s. Ben Stokes was replaced by Chris Woakes and Liam Plunkett’s ankle injury opened the door for Chris Jordan. Both changes helped the home side.
Indian openers never provided a solid foundation. The best opening partnership came in the second innings of the first Test with 49 runs. The other opening stands delivered scores as small as 33 and 49, 11 and 40, 17 and 26, 8 and 6, 3 and 6.
The faulty techniques of Gambhir, Dhawan, Pujara and Kohli were exposed by the English fast bowlers. The Indian batsmen had no answer to James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Chris Jordan and even spinner Moeen Ali.
Former Indian captain and commentator Sunil Gavaskar criticised the Indian players and has demanded some hard decisions. After the fifth Test, he said that two days back, "I was defending the Indian team but after watching the last day performance . . . I am really very dejected, it means the batsmen not learning".
Joe Root of England was the top scorer of the series with 518 runs with the average of 103.60, including two hundreds and three fifties. For India opener Murali Vijay was the highest run-getter with 402 runs, which included one century and two fifties.
England’s James Anderson was the most successful bower of the series with 25 wickets at an average of 20.60, while Moeen Ali, Stuart Broad and Bhuvneshwar Kumar had 19 wickets each.