Follow UsRarely has a ‘certain win’ turned into a ‘certain defeat’ quicker than what unfolded with regards to team India at Headingley.
With two hours to go on Day 4, India had a lead of 339 with six wickets in hand, and their best batter was unbeaten on 137*. This was, for a lack of better word, an ‘unlosable’ position.
Yet as it turned out, the visitors not just lost but ended up getting humiliated and obliterated, with England sleepwalking their way to a 371 chase untroubled.
It’s a demoralising defeat which will be hard to shake off, but the good thing from an Indian perspective is that it’s the sort of loss one can learn from. And Shubman Gill and India had plenty of learnings at Headingley — learnings that, going forward, might help them understand the magnitude of challenge in front of them and realise what they cannot afford to do.
#1 - Kill the game when you have the chance (India were guilty twice)
India collapsing from 430/3 to 471/10 in the first innings and 287/3 to 364/10 in the second ended up eventually proving fatal. And both collapses were incited by soft dismissals that came against the run of play, at a point where England looked down and out.
In the first innings, with England producing no threat whatsoever, Gill gifted his wicket by mis-hitting an innocuous delivery from Shoaib Bashir. Remarkably, the same happened with Rishabh Pant in the second innings, against the very same bowler.
It’s one thing trying to dominate, but it almost looked like India, in both innings, had a ‘we’ve got enough on the board, it’s time to have some fun now’ attitude. A bit of complacency, dare I say.
As it turned out, the two loose shots — which gave England a tiny opening — ended up coming back to bite them.
The biggest lesson for India from Headingley is this: kill the game when you’re on top, shut the door down completely.
Twice now in consecutive games in England (Edgbaston 2022, Headingley 2025) India have paid the price for not batting England out of the game. Giving any sort of a sniff to this English side on home soil is a heinous crime.
#2 - Picking a fourth bowler because ‘he can bat’ is a disaster
For the most part, it looked like India played the Headingley Test with 10 men. The management picked Shardul Thakur because ‘he can bat’ but he scored a grand total of 5 runs while bowling 16/183 overs that England batted. If not for picking two wickets — in as many balls — with the two worst deliveries in the Test match, he would have not bowled 10 overs on day five either (which went for 51, by the way).
The only way India are going to come close to competing in this series is by picking 20 wickets regularly, and they are NOT going to do that with Thakur in the XI.
Maybe they could have afforded to have Thakur in the side if they had Hazlewood and Cummins alongside Bumrah, but not with Siraj and Prasidh being the other two seamers — they themselves are mercurial and need an extra bowler who can help them out, not someone significantly worse than them.
It’s hence time for the visitors to put an end to the Shardul Thakur experiment for good.
#3 - Shubman Gill will have to improve his DRS game
At Headingley, India did not get a single review and that’s okay; there were a couple of close umpires’ calls which could easily have gone the other way with a bit of luck. What was not okay was the desperation with which skipper Gill burnt his reviews on day five, taking a couple of absurd reviews clearly fueled by emotion.
The Zak Crawley review on 15.4 was a slightly debatable call (considering the keeper did not look convinced) but the Ben Stokes review on 55.2 was dubious.
It’s understandable that the game situation almost forced Gill to go for the review, but based on the evidence from the Headingley Test, India’s DRS process under the new leadership looks….questionable.
The hasty reviewing did not hurt the side in either innings, but it could very well haunt them later on in the series if the current process is not refined a bit. Less emotion and more practicality might be required.