Former India opener Aakash Chopra has criticised Ben Stokes’ batting performance in the recently concluded five-match Test series. Stokes’s England suffered a crashing 1-4 series defeat to India as they failed to capitalise after taking an early 1-0 lead. The Bazball approach failed miserably on the Indian soil as Stokes also underperformed with the bat. The English all-rounder only managed to hit one half-century in a five-match series, however, the English media hyped their Test captain and compared him with the likes of Ian Botham.
Chopra criticised Stokes’ form and said he scored almost as many runs as tailender Tom Hartley who made his debut in the first match of the series.
“The England media is saying that Ben Stokes is at par with Ian Botham as an all-rounder. I am saying the truth is that he has been extremely disappointing as a batter in this entire series. Despite scoring 70 runs in the first match, his and Tom Hartley’s runs are almost equal,” Chopra said on his YouTube channel.
Stokes grabbed eyeballs with the wicket of Rohit Sharma on his first ball after almost nine months. The English media started hyping up their skipper but his numbers with the bat were underwhelming. In 10 innings, Stokes managed to score just 199 runs at an average of 19.90. After a fifty in the first innings of the Hyderabad Test, it all went downhill for the English skipper.
Meanwhile, another England star who failed miserably in the series was Jonny Bairstow who played his 100th Test in Dharamsala. The veteran Englishman scored 238 runs in Tests at an underwhelming average of 23.80 as he failed to register a half-century in 10 innings.
Dissecting Bairstow’s approach, Chopra said that the Englishman was low on confidence and looked to escape whenever he entered the middle for batting.
“Jonny Bairstow doesn’t play while standing in his position because he doesn’t have the confidence to do that. He is not reading the ball from the hand and the big shots are a cop-out. Whenever you saw Jonny Bairstow play, you felt like he wanted to break jail and escape,” Chopra said.
