England registered their second win on their ongoing tour of India after clinching a convincing win in the first T20 International of the three-match series at Kanpur on Thursday. After restricting India to 147-7, the English batsmen came out all guns blazing and knocked off the required runs in 18.1 to help their team to an emphatic seven-wicket win.
England got off to a brisk start with the new opening pair of Jason Roy and Sam Billings scoring 42 runs in just over three overs. Though the visitors lost both openers in the same over, Joe Root and captain Eoin Morgan added 83 runs in style to ensure they did not give the home team any chance of staging a comeback.
Morgan, who reached 1,500 T20I runs milestone during the knock, was dismissed for a 38-ball 51 with his team on the brink. Root (unbeaten run-a-ball 46), in the company of Ben Stokes, saw England past the finish line.
Earlier in the evening, after being put in to bat, India had 34 runs on the board before the new opening pair of KL Rahul and Virat Kohli was separated. The pair appeared to score runs with ease before a pacy short delivery from Chris Jordan took Rahul by surprise, and the batsman only managed a top-edge to the man at short fine-leg (Adil Rashid). Shortly after, the captain too departed. Kohli should count himself unlucky since his fierce whip found his opposite number at short midwicket (Eoin Morgan), when he was batting at 29.
Thereafter India kept losing wickets at regular intervals and never found momentum at any stage during the rest of the innings. In the eleventh over, Yuvraj Singh top-edged a pull and got caught at fine leg (Adil Rashid).
In the following over, Suresh Raina, who made a fluent 34 in his comeback match, failed to put bat to a leg stump yorker from Ben Stokes and was bowled behind his pads.
Manish Pandey and Hardik Pandya were dismissed for single-digit scores too. Losing four wickets in the middle stages of the innings and not scoring too many runs in the middle overs perhaps cost Team India.
The Indian team also paid the price for not taking full toll of Moeen Ali. The part-time off-spinner, whose career economy rate before the match stood at 8.22, returned with career-best returns for 2 for 21.
The 29-year old struck a telling blow with the first delivery, when he dismissed Virat Kohli, and added a second wicket to his kitty thereafter when he trapped Manish Pandey leg before wicket.
The off-spinner bowled nine dot deliveries and conceded only one boundary in his four-over spell. The Indian batsmen were definitely capable of milking him for more than the 21 runs he conceded.
What also hurt India was that they didn’t find the one big partnership that would have helped the team to a competitive total. The 34-run opening partnership between KL Rahul and Virat Kohli was the biggest stand in the India innings, while there were five other partnerships in the innings which were worth 20 runs or more.
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In contrast, the England innings had two big partnerships. The openers added 42 runs, while the third wicket pair of Joe Root and Eoin Morgan added 83 runs – England’s highest partnership in T20Is against India – and took the match away from the home team.
There was one other stark difference between the two teams. While the Indian batsmen managed to score 13 boundaries and hit only a solitary six in their innings, the visitors smashed eight boundaries and seven maximums.
The boundaries at the Green Park Stadium in Kanpur were fairly small, and the England bowlers deserve a lot of credit for not allowing the Indian batsmen to deposit too many deliveries into the stands.
The caravan now shifts to Nagpur, where the two teams will clash in the second T20I scheduled to be played on January 29.
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