The skipper Ben Stokes has opened their side’s defeat in England’s tour of India 2024.
Ben Stokes’ Words on defeat in India Tests
England suffered a 4-1 test series defeat against India. Despite winning the opening match, England failed to clinch victory in the other four tests.
But England skipper Ben Stokes expressed his pride in his team’s performance despite suffering a series. Coming to the fifth match, England won the toss and opted to bat where the visitors scored only 218 runs on their first innings.
Zak Crawley was the only half-centurion for England. Kuldeep Yadav and Ashwin created havoc in the batting line picking up 5 and 4 wickets respectively.
India had a great start as the top order was impressive producing 250-plus scores for the third wicket. Rohit Sharma and Shubman Gill posted a century each. With Padikkal and Sarfaraz Khan smashing a half-century each in the match, India was able to push the scores to 450+ runs in the first innings.
Shoaib Bashir’s efforts with a five-wicket haul were useless as India set up a huge score against England. Starting their second innings, England’s batters struggled with Ashwin‘s intense bowling attacks where he picked a five-wicket haul.
Finally, England was all out for 195 runs and lost the match by an innings and 64 runs. While speaking in the post-match conference, Ben Stokes said, “We have been outplayed by the better team of the series. We have so much cricketing coming up, so looking forward to it.
When you look at the series as a whole, in those small moments we haven’t been able to keep it going. We all know as individuals as to where it all went wrong.
When India get on top with the ball a lot men come around the bat and you got to find ways to keep those guys out of play and you need to be positive enough to take those risks and sometimes it could lead to downfall.
Crawley and Duckett continuing their partnership at the top and Bashir and Hartley have been really exceptional the whole series and Root coming into form at the backend is really exciting ahead of our summer.
Amazing to be on the field with Jimmy. 700 wickets for a seamer is quite phenomenal, from the day he first started being a cricketer to where he is now, the desire and commitment is still there and he if the fittest cricketer I have ever seen,” he concluded.
With England having no schedules until the second part of the May month, players who all are involved in the IPL 2024 league will join respective camps ahead of the tournament.
England will be playing a four-match T20I series against Pakistan before participating in the Men’s T20 World Cup 2024 campaign in the USA and Caribbean.
England and Pakistan will be playing their first T20I match on May 22 at Headingley Carnegie.
