India thumped England by a huge margin of 100 runs at the Bharat Ratna Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee Ekana Cricket Stadium in Lucknow on Sunday, October 29 to continue their invincible run in the ongoing ODI World Cup 2023. England's World Cup campaign has received a seemingly irreparable dent and it looks unlikely that the defending champions will manage to make it to the semifinals from here.
Having been asked to bat first after the English skipper Jos Buttler won the toss, India got off to a miserable start as three of the top batters namely Shubman Gill, Virat Kohli and Shreyas Iyer got dismissed without troubling the scorers much. Shubman (9) was cleaned up by Chris Woakes in the fourth over of the match and it followed the dismissals of Virat who scored the first duck of his World Cup career and Shreyas Iyer (4).
India were looking in a spot of bother after losing three early wickets and could have folded early if it wasn't for the pair of Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul. Rohit anchored the innings really well and dug deep alongside Rahul to stitch a 91-run stand for the fourth wicket to bail the Men in Blue out of crisis.
However, Rahul (39 off 58 balls) lost his concentration and went for an ambitious pull that led to his undoing and brought the Three Lions back into the hunt. Player of the Match Rohit also fell soon after and got out at an individual score of 87 but it was his counterattacking innings that brought the hosts back into the game. Suryakumar Yadav scored a handy 49 to help India score a defendable 229 on the board.
In reply, the English batting order fell like a pack of cards against the might of the Indian bowling. The two English openers Jonny Bairstow (14 off 23 balls) and Dawid Malan (27 off 46 balls) got the team off to a promising start but their dismissals opened the floodgates and England could never manage to get back into the game.
Barring Joe Root and Ben Stokes who got out for ducks, all the other English batters got starts but none of them managed to make it big as the Indian bowling attack kept picking up wickets at regular intervals. England eventually folded for 129 runs in 34.5 overs.
