It was a one-way traffic for India in the first of their five-match T20I series against England at the Eden Gardens on Wednesday. The Men in Blue fell back on a template almost akin to the IPL outfit Kolkata Knight Riders at this venue – not a surprise with Gautam Gambhir at the helm of affairs – and it paid rich dividends.
The hosts’ gameplan was clear as they kept out senior paceman Mohammed Shami – albeit surprisingly – going for a three-pronged spin attack comprising of mystery spinner Varun Chakravarthy, new deputy Axar Patel and leggie Ravi Bishnoi. It brought about some fresh doubts over Shami’s match fitness, more so with all the talk of dew posing a likely problem for the spinners.
The TV pundits, especially former England opener Nick Knight, said that he was ‘shivering and shaking’ at India’s line-up and thought that Shami ought to have made the cut on this wicket. It made no difference in the end as Chakravarthy, who was a key strike weapon for Gambhir in their successful IPL 2024 campaign, posed all kinds of questions of the English batters and ended with figures of 4-0-23-3.
The over-spin in his weapon, which got Harry Brook, England’s best batter across formats on form and Liam Livingstone within a space of three balls were simply peach of deliveries. Captain Jos Buttler wielded a lone battle as the rest failed to adapt to the conditions for his brilliant half-century, though he eventually fell to India’s mystery man.
Varun’s stock has seen an incredible rise in the Indian T20I team since the conclusion of the T20 World Cup 2024. Under the Gautam Gambhir-Suryakumar Yadav era, he was brought back into the side and he repaid the faith by picking up truckloads of wickets against Bangladesh at home and then South Africa.
Easy chase
A total of 132 was never meant to seriously test the young Indian batting line-up in the white ball game – and openers Sanju Samson and Abhishek Sharma seemed to be continuing from where they had left off in South Africa. The England bowlers failed to pose any kind of problem against southpaw Abhishek, who toyed with their attack to slam eight sixes and five fours for his blazing innings of 79 off 34 balls – at a strike rate of 232.35 to win the Player of the Match.
The T20 bandwagon moves to Chennai next for the second game on Saturday (25 January). Now that India’s T20 specialists have set up the tempo for the series, it would be interesting if Shami finally gets the nod to test his match fitness ahead of the ODI series and the ICC Champions Trophy next month.
