|| India Correspondent ||
As England are taking on India, former England captain Nasser Hussain lashed out at the England team for their team selection for the fourth and final Test at Motera in Ahmedabad. The Joe Root-led team could manage only 205 runs in the first innings on Day 1 where India spinners Axar Patel, R Ashwin, and Washington Sundar did the bulk of the damage.
England dropped Jofra Archer and Stuart Broad and brought back Ollie Pope and Dom Bess in the batting line-up. England added only one pacer James Anderson, along with allrounder Ben Stokes in the playing XI and Hussain said that England have picked up the team which was fit for the third Test.
"Five times they have failed to make 200 in this series and now they've only just scraped past that modest total thanks to a couple of reverse sweeps from Jimmy Anderson. It just shows where they are with their batting in these conditions. It was almost as if England had picked a side for the last Test. They left out two of their seamers because they thought the ball would spin from day one again but as it turned out it did a bit for Mohammed Siraj and Ishant Sharma on the first morning," he wrote in his column on Daily Mail.
"England can count themselves very lucky they did win that toss because bowling would have been hard work for them with the attack they chose. Yes, you can see the need for an extra batsman, in this case Dan Lawrence, on a poor pitch, but in this game England needed three seamers and the extra spinner. They have not read the conditions well and have not played particularly well," Hussain further added.
"Virat Kohli’s captaincy is always better when India are ahead in the game so yesterday suited him perfectly. When he has two spinners and things are going well he is at his best but when his side are behind he gets ruffled and starts to follow the ball with his field placings. So England haven’t really tested him since that first Test," he concluded.