THE third day's play in the second Test match between India and England at ACA-VDCA Cricket Stadium in Hyderabad on Sunday (4) witnessed a see-saw battle with the visitors doing well to restrict the home team to 255 and setting themselves a target of 399 to go 2-0 up in the five-match series.
In their second innings, India faced yet another batting collapse with Shubman Gill's century standing tall among the ruins. The right-handed batter, who came under criticism for a prolonged bad patch in the long format, scored 104 off 147 balls -- his first Test ton (overall second) after almost a year. However, his fall on the team score of 211 triggered a collapse and India lost their last six wickets for only 44 runs, giving the visitors a psychological edge of chasing less than 400 runs in the fourth innings.
The hosts resumed their innings from the overnight score of 28 for no loss but lost both their openers Yashasvi Jaiswal (17) and Rohit Sharma (13) cheaply before Gill added 81 crucial runs with Shreyas Iyer (29) for the third wicket and Gill and Axar Patel (45) 89 runs for the fifth wicket.
Read: Bumrah wrecks England with 6-fer to give India 143-run lead in 2nd Test
For England, spinner Tom Hartley, who spun England to 28-run win in the first Test with figures of 7 for 62, was the pick of the bowlers for the Three Lions with 4 for 77. Other spinners Rehan Ahmed (3) and Shoaib Bashir (1) shared four wickets while James Anderson took two to get near the 700-run club in Tests.
Brief scores: India 396 & 255 England 253
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