England Test skipper Ben Stokes has remained incredibly overjoyed since England knocked down India in the first Test match of the five-match series on Sunday in Hyderabad. It remained a competitive affair for England to bring down India in their own backyard, but Ollie Pope and debutant Tom Hartley made the job easy for England to overpower India. 

Ollie Pope churned out 196 runs to put England into stability while Tom Hartley claimed seven wickets to restrict India from chasing 231-run target. India didn’t have the best of performances from their players with top-order lineup losing their wickets at regular intervals. Since, Ben Stokes took the reins in 2022, England have done fairly beautiful in the red-ball cricket with their 14 victories from 19 games. 

“Since I’ve taken the captaincy on, we’ve had a lot of fantastic moments as a team. We’ve had a lot of great victories, we’ve been involved in some amazing games. But I think, where we are and who we’re playing against, this victory is one hundred percent, definitely our greatest triumph since I’ve been captain,” Stokes said.

Tom Hartley remained the star of the show for England, sending back Indian batters one by one with his rhythmic spell to bring India’s chase to a standstill. 

“Tom came into the squad for the first time. He’s had a lot of languages spoken, a lot of confidence given to him with that.”

“The gameplan there is, we’re out here for a long tour and this is going to be a long game, so I was willing to give him the longer spell regardless of what had happened because I knew I was going to have to turn back to him at some point throughout this Test match. Allowing him to have the longer spell at the start was almost justification to say, ‘you know, what I was telling you before the game started is going to happen.”

“Whether or not that was the reason to say he got seven wickets and won us the game this innings, who knows? But that was the thought process behind it and giving the people we select complete backing and not going back on the words that we speak. 

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