Key events
Preamble
Afternoon everyone, or is it still the morning after the night before? There’s only one way to cope with sporting heartbreak and that is to get back on the horse. You may wonder whether a bilateral ODI, quite likely to be forgotten by next week, can heal the wounds of a World Cup semi-final in which England’s German manager threw away a lead and became more English than the English. But maybe it can provide a distraction, and at least we know that today the England coach won’t be indefensibly defensive.
This is a game that has to be won, or the three-match series will be gone in three days flat. Harry Brook and Brendon McCullum, so successful in T20s (bar the odd World Cup semi-final), haven’t come close to mastering the 50-over game. On Tuesday at Edgbaston they made a big mistake, picking three spinners on a surface that was crying out for four seamers. Brook confirmed it by bowling his three seamers out and barely using Liam Dawson, who might have thought it was going to be his day after making his first international fifty.
It wasn’t all down to that misreading of the pitch. India’s old guns, led by the great Jasprit Bumrah, made far steelier foes than their young blades. God help England when Rohit, Virat and Rahul add some runs to their magisterial presence. But England have the blazing talent of Brook, and the quiet excellence of Joe Root, and surely their middle order can’t be quite that flaky again.
Play starts at 1pm and the forecast, I regret to report, is for yet more of this tedious sunshine. Back soon with the teams.
