Big picture: No time to process series losses for England, India
Neither of these teams has the time to sit back and analyse. While India will get just one training session, England will have to squeeze theirs in the afternoon on a day they travel from Nottingham to Durham. Then they turn up on July 1 to start the five-match T20I series, which ironically gets the biggest viewership but least attention from those involved. Whether you take it seriously or not, this series is likely to be the most-watched event of the English summer.
What remains true of these two sides is that there is plenty of firepower in their ranks to take us back to high-scoring times on more standardised T20 pitches. If not, it will be a big test of both side’s big hitters’ adaptability.
India LLWWW (last five completed T20Is, most recent first)
England LWWWW
In the spotlight: Shreyas Iyer and Harry Brook
Team news: England more settled than India?
All of a sudden England are looking more settled than the world champions. They named their XI a day out, with Jofra Archer and Josh Tongue rested following their involvement in the Trent Bridge Test. Saqib Mahmood and Luke Wood come in as the only changes from the teams’ meeting in the T20 World Cup semi-final (Jamie Overton is not in the squad through injury).
England (probable) 1 Phil Salt, 2 Jos Butler (wk), 3 Harry Brook (capt.), 4 Jacob Bethell, 5 Tom Banton, 6 Sam Curran, 7 Will Jacks, 8 Liam Dawson, 9 Adil Rashid, 10 Luke Wood, 11 Saqib Mahmood
India will be buoyed with the return of Varun Chakravarthy, but that will mean making the difficult call of leaving out one of Arshdeep Singh, Harshit Rana and Prince Yadav. Going by the public utterances from the team management, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi might still have to wait for a debut.
India (probable) 1 Sanju Samson/Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, 2 Abhishek Sharma, 3 Ishan Kishan (wk), 4 Shreyas Iyer (capt.), 5 Tilak Varma, 6 Suryansh Shedge, 7 Shivam Dube, 8 Axar Patel, 9 Arshdeep Singh, 10 Harshit Rana, 11 Prince Yadav/Varun Chakravarthy
The pitch in Chester-Le-Street this year has been a mixed bag in this year’s Blast games. Two middling scores have been defended successfully, one has been chased down, but the latest match, a 10-over affair, was 128 plays 130. There is a drizzle around on Wednesday evening.
