Ben Stokes, the flamboyant all-rounder has had a forgettable tournament with the bat in hand. The left-handed batter was outdone by the sheer brilliance of Mohammed Shami who not only castled his stumps. Ben Stokes hasn’t been able to dictate the terms and has looked in two minds whether to attack or defend which has hurt the team.
England cricket team would be in a state of shock after losing the match by 100 runs against India. It looked as if the entire billion people was bowling against England so was the crowd support and the energy shown by Rohit Sharm’s unit in the match. The batters lacked the fight and intent as chasing 230 runs isn’t a tough task in modern cricket.
England now are officially out of the ODI WC 2023 and with their next opponent being Australia, they can only hope that they are not up against the lethal duo of Warner & Head. We must admit the fact that England looked scratchy from their first match against New Zealand as the skipper Jos Buttler seemed a bit too tense.
Ben Stokes has been the key man in so many difficult situations- Nasser Hussain
Nasser Hussain wrote in his column for the Daily Mail. Nasser Hussain pointed out that the dismissal of Ben Stokes was quite odd as the batter was seen struggling to time the ball in testing contributions. Nasser Hussain stated that England should have adopted old school approach and played out a tricky phase when Indian bowlers were on a roll.
“I was on commentary at that time with Eoin Morgan, when Ben Stokes was batting, and that is when we disagreed. Eoin would have tried to hit the ball into the outfield to try to make it wet and harder to bowl with, and that’s exactly what Stokes tried to do,” said Ben Stokes.
“It is very rare Ben gets it wrong, and he has been the key man in so many difficult situations in different forms of cricket over the years. But I’m not sure he got it right this time and contributed to England again losing wickets in the powerplay,” he stated.
“What England had to do was come through that tricky five to 10 over period at the start of their innings when the new ball was going to nip around, and then, things would have become easier for them. So, for me, old-fashioned as I am, that was the time when they needed to grind it out and survive that difficult spell you get in any form of the game,” he added.