England succumbed to a 106-run defeat on the fourth day of the second Test in Vizag, with India fast bowler Jasprit Bumrah finishing with match figures of 9-91; follow England's five-Test series in India across Sky Sports' digital platforms with live blogs and reports
Monday 5 February 2024 18:13, UK
A 'genius' spell from fast bowler Jasprit Bumrah helped India level their series against England with a win in Vizag and, with the likes of Virat Kohli and KL Rahul still to return to the side, Sky Sports' Nasser Hussain expects the hosts to 'come back even harder' over the final three Tests...
Another fantastic Test match.
It was two brilliant sides, on a brilliant pitch, going hard at each other. It went one way, then the other and England fought hard, as they often do.
I think, really, it was just the magic of Jasprit Bumrah that was the difference. He got three-for today, but it was that incredible spell in the first innings, 6-45, that blew away England for 253 on a really good, flat pitch.
Sometimes you can be critical of your own team, look at your performance and say, 'what could we do better?' But sometimes you also have to just just doff your cap to the opposition and say they were touched by genius.
That's exactly what happened. That spell from Bumrah in England's first innings was genius.
Reverse swing, with his slightly unorthodox action and the way he leans across to the offside, he creates angles. He's all over Joe Root at the moment - he's got him out eight times in Test cricket - and he got Ollie Pope with an absolute beauty of an in-swinging yorker. He also bowled Ben Stokes from round the wicket, who dropped his bat in disbelief.
For England, it was the reverse of the first Test in many ways, where India had a lot of batters score 70s and 80s and no-one converted one into a big hundred.
That was the big difference between the sides here. Yashasvi Jaiswal, in the first innings, played brilliantly to get a double-hundred, and then there was Shubman Gill's welcome return to form with a hundred in the second.
Some of the basics are still there, even in this modern era. If you're going to win Test matches, get big runs and big hundreds. Especially in India, where you know it's only going to get tougher for the next batter, it's going to spin more and it's going to reverse.
Crawley played fantastically. When Bumrah hit a length, Crawley left well. When he overpitched, he hit him for beautiful drives down the ground. When he got too straight, which wasn’t very often, he clipped him for four. He saw off that spell on the final morning but scored and put pressure on the bowler.
But let's highlight the positives: from where Zak Crawley was a year ago, where everyone was calling for his head and saying he shouldn't be in the England side, look at how he played in the Ashes and how he's playing at the moment.
He is confident. And the reason he's so confident is because he's playing with an attacking mindset, how England want him to play.
Occasionally he'll get the wrong side of that, as was the case in the first innings, but he's playing beautifully at the moment - though, as a batter, you're always going to want more.
It is set up perfectly, with three Tests to play. I think it will be a tight series but England are going to have to expect India to come back even harder.
India have missed quite a few key players so far. Mohammad Shami, I think, is out for the series, Ravi Jadeja could well be out for another Test match and Virat Kohli has been out of the first two. We are talking about some serious cricketers there.
Kohli may well come back in, KL Rahul also, so I would expect a stronger Indian side in those last three games of the series. England will know that they're going to have to up their game.
Follow over-by-over text commentary from the third Test between India and England, in Rajkot, from Thursday, February 15 live on skysports.com and the Sky Sports App.
