
Courtesy: BCCI/X
During the first T20I of the five-match series, Indian spinner Varun Chakravarthy continued his good run in the shortest format of the game, cleaning up the destructive Harry Brook and Liam Livingstone in the same over. Following a difficult start for England in the power play overs after being put into bat first, Varun Chakravarthy kept the pressure on the opposition batters before dismissing two of them in just three balls.
The wickets of Harry Brook (17 off 14) and Liam Livingstone (0 off 2) fell in the eighth over of the English innings with two incredible wrong’uns from Varun Chakravarthy which the two right-handed batters didn’t pick up. Over the last few months, Varun Chakravarthy has been quite a handful with the ball, picking up wickets at will in franchise and international T20 cricket, to take his career trajectory to the next level.
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In the meantime, England’s captain Jos Buttler has been batting well from his end, reaching yet another fifty in his T20I career, the first under Brendon McCullum, who assumed the head coach role of the white-ball setup. As of this writing, England have reached 95/6 in 13.3 overs with Jos Buttler at the crease on 60 off 40 with eight fours and one maximum.
Below are the playing XI s of India and England for the first T20I in Kolkata:
India: Abhishek Sharma, Sanju Samson (wk), Tilak Varma, Suryakumar Yadav (c), Hardik Pandya, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Rinku Singh, Axar Patel, Ravi Bishnoi, Varun Chakravarthy, Arshdeep Singh
England: Ben Duckett, Phil Salt (wk), Jos Buttler (c), Harry Brook, Liam Livingstone, Jacob Bethell, Craig Overton, Gus Atkinson, Jofra Archer, Adil Rashid, Mark Wood