India tour of England 2025 - 5 Tests

Final Outcome of the series

  • England

    Votes: 9 52.9%
  • India

    Votes: 5 29.4%
  • Series Drawn

    Votes: 3 17.6%

  • Total voters
    17
Good batting performance from India, bar the debutant. I have grown up seeing India tottering at lunch time around 47/5 in SENA test matches. This is a welcome surprise.
Wait till you see a green tinge right from day 1 in remaining tests :D
 
Credit where it's due, Gill played a fabulous knock. You can say, not tough pitch & bowling attack, but coming after two quick wickets & your no 3 gone for a pair, it's a special knock after so many of his own failures in red ball.
 
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England's bowling attack looks toothless. And looking at the squad, no real other options lying around either.

India are strolling along - more than 5.5 an hour for the last 10 overs. I'd be surprised if India don't breach 500 in this first innings.
 
Credit where it's due, Gill played a fabulous knock. You can say, not tough pitch & bowling attack, but coming after two quick wickets & your no 3 gone for a pair, it's a special knock after so many of his own failures in red ball.
Agreed credits due where it due.
 
England learnt a tough lesson today - 83-85mph is not and never will be the same as 86-90 unless you’re exceptional.

Josh Tongue is not exceptional.

79-81mph never works without cloud cover. Chris Woakes in a heat wave may as well be me.

Get someone fast fit soon, or the winter will be brutal.

This was with Dukes FFS
 
Josh Tongue is not exceptional.
He also spent the first half of the day bowling between 87 and 90 mph; he erred slightly full, but lack of pace is not an issue for him.

The bigger issue is that he's made of glass and that's because in the first 27 years of his life, not a single coach has done anything to reduce the amount of contradictory and torsion forces in his action that literally tear his body apart every time he bowls. I've tried to annotate a photo with what I mean:
1750458701340.png
This is one of the ECB's favourite fast bowling talents and seemingly nobody has stepped in to try to sort his alignment out. That's not to say that all bowlers need to bowl the same way as each other with identikit techniques: the obvious example of someone who doesn't is Jasprit Bumrah:

1750459010060.png
Aaaand Bumrah has far better biomechanical alignment than Tongue does, and that's why despite his hyperextension (which is the main culprit for all that visual weirdness in his bowling), he didn't really experience any significant soft tissue injuries: the majority of his injuries have been the result of repeated stress from his exceptional workload.

We can also compare him to two of the best-coached and best-nurtured fast bowlers in recent memory:

You can visually see how aligned and stable both Cummins and Hazlewood are through their delivery stride, despite having very different bowling actions.

Now compare that to Josh Tongue again, with footage taken from when he was bowling at his best a couple of years ago:
 

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