India beat England by 95 runs to win the second Test at Lord’s yesterday.
Victory gave India their first away win in 16 Tests, a run stretching back to June 2011, and was just their second win in 17 Tests at Lord’s.
England, set 319 to win, were bowled out for 223.
Photo: Reuters
They lost six wickets for 50 runs either side of lunch as India paceman Ishant Sharma took a Test-best 7-74.
England were 173-5 at lunch, needing a further 146 runs to reach the victory target.
Joe Root was 52 not out after Moeen Ali fell for 39 off the final ball before lunch to end a fifth-wicket partnership of 101 before the collapse.
Wicketkeeper Matt Prior hit a pair of boundaries shortly after lunch, but was dismissed for 12 after hooking Sharma to Murali Vijay.
Ben Stokes continued a sequence of low scores with his fourth consecutive duck, also caught of Sharma’s bowling.
The match was all but over when Root was next to go, also caught out after a hook shot against Sharma for 66.
Stuart Broad made 8 before James Anderson was last man out, run out for 2.
Liam Plunkett was left not out on 7.
India lead the five-match series 1-0 after the first Test at Trent Bridge was drawn.
On Sunday, England captain Alastair Cook’s dreadful run of form continued as he was dismissed for just 22.
The left-handed opener fell in all-too familiar fashion when, having batted for more than two hours, he pushed at a ball outside off-stump from Sharma and was caught behind for the second time in the match by opposing captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni.
That made it 27 innings since the 29-year-old Cook scored the last of his England record 25 Test hundreds.
And it also meant that Cook had totalled a meager 129 runs in nine Test innings this calendar year.
The more immediate concern for England was that Cook’s latest dismissal came during a collapse that saw England lose three wickets for two runs as they slumped to 72-4.
“Alastair Cook was doing OK, but he was doing alright in the first innings until he got out,” said former England opener Geoffrey Boycott, commentating for BBC Radio’s Test Match Special.
“He can’t totally eradicate his faults. The selectors are all hoping he gets a fifty, but it’s not happening for him.”
Cook’s slump has coincided with an England run of nine successive Tests without a victory, their worst for more than 20 years.
Before play began on Sunday, Michael Vaughan became the latest former England captain to suggest Cook needed to shed the responsibilities of leadership if he was to regain his form as a batsman.
“We have reached the stage with Cook when he cannot be enjoying cricket. You don’t when you are not playing well and the team is struggling,” Vaughan, England’s 2005 Ashes-winning captain, wrote in his Telegraph column.
“It is easy for the England and Wales Cricket Board [ECB] hierarchy to say it is going to stick by him, but it has to ask what is best for the team and for Cook,” he wrote.
“The ECB has a responsibility to Cook the person to do the right thing and if that means taking the captaincy away then so be it,” Vaughan wrote.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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