India thrashed England by 157 runs in the fourth Test at The Oval on Monday to take all 10 wickets in the home team’s second innings on the last day.
It was India’s second Test match win at the Oval, their first such success on English soil, coming 50 years after their four-wicket victory at the South London ground.
A look at some of the key aspects of the match that Virat Kohli’s team thrashed 2-1 at Old Trafford ahead of the fifth Test starting on Friday.
anderson burden
James Anderson, whose 632 wickets is the most by any fast bowler in Test history, has been England’s leader for a long time.
But in this match, at any age where most fast bowlers have long retired, the 39-year-old was also a workhorse, with captain Joe Root unable to rely on either Craig Overton or off-spinner Moeen Ali.
The result was that in an attack without Anderson, long-absent Stuart Broad, Jofra Archer and Olly Stone as well as Mark Wood, all-rounder Ben Stokes disappeared due to a mental-health break – sending down 47 overs. Given. For a modest match return of 2-120.
Anderson has so far bowled 163.3 overs in the series, in which he has played all four Tests.
That workload could mean that England, ahead of the Ashes tour, decide to rest Anderson from India’s final even though the match is taking place at Lancashire’s home ground, with Root conceding: “It’s a delicate The balancing act.”
Sharma right wrong
Another interesting statistic before this match was that Rohit Sharma had never scored a Test century outside India.
But the opener filled that gap in his CV with a brilliant 127 in India’s second innings total of 466.
Sharma now leads India’s batting average in this series with 368 runs at 52.57, including two fifties.
Five of Sharma’s eight Test hundreds have come since his top-order in 2019, with the 34-year-old right-handed batsman averaging 58.48 compared to an overall career mark of 46.87 as an opener.
Sharma is ready to rein in the aggressive tendencies that make him such a dangerous one-day batsman when the conditions suit the England bowlers.
“Out of the four Test matches I’ve batted in (this series), the biggest achievement is the time in between,” he said. “The runs will come.”
Shardul’s comeback in style
One of Shardul Thakur’s nicknames is ‘beefy’, a tag once applied to Ian Botham and, while no one is suggesting that the 29-year-old all-rounder is in the same class as the England great, he is a highly Becoming an effective Test-match cricketer.
Thakur became a star with both bat and ball in his return match from a hamstring injury in the drawn first Test at Nottingham.
He scored two fifties, 57 in his first innings which was particularly valuable as it helped India recover from 127-7 to a total of 191 which kept him in the game.
The bustling medium pacer also took three wickets in the match, including Root’s prized scalp on Monday, with some questioning whether he should be included in the attack without Mohammed Shami or star off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin, who has so far this series. to display.
“His effort was huge,” said Thakur’s India pacer Jasprit Bumrah, who now averages 38 with the bat and 22.71 with the ball in his four career Tests.
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