The Indian Test captain Shubman Gill might have to practice calling at tosses to get better at it as the coin fell in favour of England's Ben Stokes for the third time in his first assignment. Starting from January 31, the fourth T20I against England in Pune, the entire Champions Trophy and now three Tests into the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy, India have lost 13 tosses in a row in international cricket, which is the most for any team as the two-time World Test Championship finalists broke the West Indies' record.
The West Indies from a period of February 2 to April 21 in 1999, lost 12 consecutive tosses in international cricket across formats with England losing 11 (December 17, 2022 to March 12, 2023).
During this period, India played a couple of T20Is in Suryakumar Yadav's captaincy, eight ODIs under Rohit Sharma and now three Test matches under Gill. But as far as the results are falling in India's favour, it shouldn't bother Shubman Gill and Co. India basically won the Champions Trophy without winning the toss and hope that is the case with the ongoing Test series as well, even if Gill calls it wrong in the last two Test matches yet again.
After losing the toss, despite several plays and misses, India's new-ball pair of Jasprit Bumrah and Akash Deep remained wicketless before Nitish Kumar Reddy, the fourth pace-bowling option struck twice in one over to dismiss both England openers Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett in the same over. Joe Root and Ollie Pope were tested by Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj in a cumulative five-over spell with vicious seam and swing off the surface post lunch but managed to survive it and stayed put.
Both teams made one change to their line-ups with Jofra Archer coming back for England and Bumrah returning for India, in place of Josh Tongue and Prasidh Krishna, respectively.
