There’s no stopping India’s left-arm spin twins

Jadeja explains the difference between him and his hunting partner Abdulla. “Iqbal bowls a slow and loopy trajectory, I bowl flat. We have different styles. We work well in tandem because if I create pressure at one end he can get wickets and vice versa,” he says. And that’s what happened today as England were strangled in the mid overs by the two spinners. Besides not conceding runs, they also took wickets at regular intervals to peg back the English batsmen.

As the two bowlers talk about their own most satisfying scalp of the day, one gets an idea about the difference in their approach to left-arm spin bowling. Abdulla says he enjoyed the wicket of England middle-order batsman Tom Westley the most. “He drives a lot. So I tossed the ball outside off-stump. The ball dipped a bit as I had planned; he failed to keep it down and he was caught in covers. It was bowled according to the field,” he says. Jadeja speaks about destroying Ben Brown castle with his special fast yorker. “It’s a ball that starts from the fourth stump, drifts in the air and goes through the bat and pad,” he says. Jadeja says that he regularly bowls this to test a newcomer. “During the South Africa game, I got a batsman out first ball. And this was after I had him out from my first ball twice during the South African tour. He knew that I would bowl again, but he couldn’t do anything about it,” he says.