'Foolish And Brave…' - Dinesh Karthik Heaps Praise On Ben Stokes' Captaincy
Ben Stokes celebrating win with teammates at Hyderabad (AP)
Tom Hartley justified his selection in England’s starting XI in the first Test of their five-match series against hosts India with a remarkable seven-wicket haul. The left-arm spinner wrecked India’s famed batting line-up, thus preventing them to get to their 231-run target to secure a 28-run win for his country.
Hartley, who also made his debut through the recently-concluded Hyderabad Test, had earlier secured dreadful figures of 2-131 from 25 overs during the first Indian innings. English captain Ben Stokes was widely questioned for his tactics of giving his struggling spinner an extensive spell, which ended up taking the visitors 190 runs away from India at the halfway stage of the game.
Indian cricketer-cum-commentator Dinesh Karthik has now given his take on Stokes’ tactics, and also expressed his admiration for Hartley over his match-winning spell.
Dinesh Karthik sums up Ben Stokes and Hartley’s tactics
Out-of-favour Indian cricketer and active commentator Dinesh Karthik recently claimed that English captain Ben Stokes is receiving widespread praise for backing first-innings struggler Tom Hartley only because the visitors managed to secure a tough win on a turning Hyderabad surface.
Karthik implied that things would have been different had the visitors lost and Stokes would have received a lot of flak over the debutant’s first-innings horror spell. While speaking on CricBuzz, he said:
“The difference between being foolish and being brave, a lot of the time, becomes the result," Karthik told Cricbuzz.
Dinesh Karthik also praised Tom Hartley for turning around his own performance by observing Ravindra Jadeja at the crease.
“What Ben Stokes has done is observe what Rohit Sharma has done and kind of followed through a little bit with his fields. But what Tom Hartley did was the opposite. When he was batting, he observed what Ravindra Jadeja was doing and realised that that's not what he wants to do. It was easier to bat when people were bowling faster, so he slowed his pace," the Indian wicketkeeper added.
With England taking a 1-0 lead in the five-match series, the two Test titans will now collide in the second match at Visakhapatnam. Their much-awaited five-day bout is set to be staged at the city’s Dr. Y. S. Rajashekar Reddy ACA–VDCA Cricket Stadium between February 2 and February 6.
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