England has successfully managed to engineer another beautiful collapse. They fell faster than a house of cards. It is becoming more predictable than Law & Order. It is almost as if they do not want to disappoint us. Why cannot they surprise us? Would England have bowled Adil Rashid within the first ten overs if they had bowled first? My intention is not to give a detailed analysis of the game or the choices that were made or not made. There are other blogs who do that. I am simply looking at the performances of the teams through the lenses of the metrics of my index.

Both the teams made changes to their team which resulted in lowering of their points in the Cricket Portfolio Index. I will go into the details of that in my main index and not over here, These posts will be just to review the England vs. India matches without any.

Team Performance

In the first graph, I am using a simple system where the integer represents the Test match and the decimal the innings. England is in dark blue and India in light blue.

Batsmen

Bowlers

Top Performers

Test XI

The stand out in the first innings is, without doubt, Virat Kohli’s innings. The whole picture would have changed if not for that innings. Is it too early to say that Dawid Malan dropped the series by dropping Kohli?

England has outperformed India is all areas except for fielding.

I have placed Kohli as the captain even though Root is there. The reason for this is Kohli has been more creative and has used Ashwin extremely well. This becomes more important as I have Adil Rashid in the team too. Rashid was extremely underused. Rashid bowled 108 balls less than Ashwin. I am convinced that Rashid would have done significantly better if he was brought in earlier. I am extremely comfortable with having two spinners and four fast bowlers in this side.