Image Credit- AP
Ben Stokes remained unapologetic about his team’s
batting performance in the second innings, even though England let a chance to
tie the series in Ranchi fall short. Day three saw England bowled out for 145
after establishing a 46-run lead in the first innings. Stokes referred to the
conditions as nearly “impossible” to bat on. However, India rallied
to win by five wickets on the fourth afternoon.
Following a promising start, England gradually lost momentum. Only Zak Crawley,
who hit his third half-century of the series, and Jonny Bairstow, with 30 off
42, gave scores of note. Ben Foakes batted with the tail and put in nearly an
hour and a half for 17 off 76 balls, as England lost their final seven wickets
for 35 runs from 25.5 overs, India’s spin trio of R Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and
Kuldeep Yadav sharing all ten wickets between them.
Asked about his side’s batting overall at the
post-match presentation, Stokes said, “I think we’ve been good in periods.
If we look at yesterday, when we had our turn with bat, [it was] I think – I
don’t want to say impossible, because I don’t think anything is impossible –
but that was incredibly hard yesterday, when you get conditions against Ashwin,
Jadeja and Kuldeep like that. Scoring becomes very, very hard, especially when
you want to eke the game out as long as we wanted to do.
“We didn’t think the pitch was going to get any better, and I think we’ve
seen that today. So look, I think the way in which the Indian spinners operated
yesterday made it incredibly hard for us to score but also to rotate the
strike. That little period there was very, very tough.
“Cricket is a game of skill against skill, isn’t
it?” he added, speaking to TNT Sport. “When you look at it like that,
skill vs skill their skill was better than ours on this occasion.”