The captain Jos Buttler was disappointed in the side’s defeat in the fourth T20I of the England tour of India 2025 and slammed the match referee’s decision to allow seamer Harshit Rana to make his debut in place of concussed batting all-rounder Shivam Dube.
Both Dube and Rana ended up making key roles with bat and ball respectively in either innings, leaving England 15 runs short in a 182-run case on Friday.
After a top-order collapse, Dube made a solid partnership with Hardik Pandya smashing 53 off 34 deliveries. Dube suffered a concussion following a Jamie Overton short ball off the penultimate ball of India’s innings.
Rana known more for his seam-bowling skills, replaced a concussion substitute prompting over the decision.
“It is not a like-for-like replacement. We don’t agree with that,” Buttler told reporters after the match.
Jos Buttler has had his say on the like-for-like concussion replacement controversy 👀
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Phil Salt and Ben Duckett had a solid start for the side as they scored 62 runs for the first wicket stand in the 5th over. The following two overs had one wicket each with Axar Patel dismising Phil Salt while Ravi Bishnoi bagged the wicket of Jos Buttler for 2 runs.
However Harrry Brook troubled Indian bowlers as he smashed 51 runs off 26 deliveries. But with his dismissal by Varun Chakravarthy the side’s defence started to crumble.
Jamie Overton and Adil Rashid scored 19 and 10 runs respectively, but it was not enough to bring victory for the visitors.
While speaking in the post match conference, Buttler said, “We started brilliantly, taking wickets in the powerplay and at the end of the batting powerplay, we were in a great position. We should have gone onto win the game.”
“We did some really good things in the game. We dropped Dube first ball and he went on to play a really good innings. With the bat, we were in a fantastic position and lost a couple of wickets quickly.”
“(Takeaways) Just to double down on how we want to play, really impressed with how we’ve committed to that. I think we ca n commit more and when we do that, we’ll get more out of ourselves.”
The final match of the T20I will be played on February 02 at Wankhede Stadium before the start of the three match ODI series against England.
