Indian cricket team recorded a dominant win in the fifth Test match against England to conclude a five-match series with a 4-1 win on Saturday.
After a stunning win in the series opener in Hyderabad, England lost the third match in Rajkot by 434 runs and the last game in Dharamsala by an innings and 64 runs. This was England's first Test series loss under Ben Stokes's captaincy, ending the Three Lions' bazball dominance in red-ball cricket.
After some close battles throughout the series, the hosts totally dominated the final match in Dharamsala to finish the game before tea on Day 3. England captain Ben Stokes accepted a defeat and agreed that a better side outplayed his team in the series.
However, the English skipper added that his team will not stop playing aggressive cricket forward. Stokes said that they will not let this series loss dent their dominance in Test cricket for the last two years.
"Now that the series has come to an end, I don't give too much away, obviously, whilst the series is going on," Stokes said in the post-match presentation. "But since the first Test match of the series, we're man enough and we're big enough to say that we've been outplayed by the better team in the series, we ain't gonna let the last two years go to waste over this series in isolation."
Meanwhile, the star all-rounder praised his team for producing 'small moments of comeback' throughout the series and said that they were not able to continue that momentum.
"When you look at the game as a whole, and the series as a whole, there's been really small moments throughout every Test match where we wrestled a bit of momentum back towards us, but we've not just been able to maintain and keep that going," Stokes said. "And in Test-match cricket, especially out here where the game can turn really fast on you, it's about understanding that and trying to understand those moments and being a bit more relentless with it. How that looks, I'm not sure, but we're all here at the highest level playing cricket. I think we all know as individuals that that's probably where it's gone wrong for us, on more than one occasion.
