Key Contests between India and England Test series in 2018
The last time India won a Test series in England was in 2007, where after escaping an inevitable defeat at Lords due to a rain interruption saw the match drawn. At Trent Bridge on the back of a famous bowling effort spearheaded by Zaheer Khan, India romped home to a famous overseas test win and drew the final test at ‘The Oval’ to secure a historic series win with Rahul Dravid as the captain.
The tour of 2011 saw India travel to England as the number one ranked Test team in the world but was soon brought down crashing to reality as they lost miserably 0-4 to England. The 2014 series started off on an encouraging note with a draw at Trent Bridge and a famous win at Lords but soon faltered over and ended up losing the series 1-3.
India will look at the 2018 series for redemption and will look to lay down the marker as the number ranked test team. The series will be ultimately decided by some key individual battles and we will look at some of them.
#1 James Anderson to Virat Kohli
It will be fascinating to see how Kohli goes about tackling the swing of Anderson. With Anderson eyeing on Glenn Mcgrath’s record of most number of wickets by a fast bowler, he will look to this five matches’ Test series to inch further to that milestone and what will be a better way than starting the mission by targeting the Indian captain. In the 2014 series, Anderson had dismissed Kohli four out of a possible 10 times.
Anderson brought Kohli forward into the drive and had him dangling his bat outside the off stump, with no clue whether he should play or leave the red duke ball. This resulted in him being trapped in front of the wicket or induced an edge. Kohli would have looked at that footage and have had surely identified his mistakes and will be looking to take on Anderson from the very outset. This might well turn out to be the contest of the summer and well define the outcome of the series because if captain Kohli is in good nick, the team ends up doing well.