London: Looking down the barrel when England seemed to be racing to an improbable victory at 301/3, chasing a record 374-run target at the Oval, Indian pacers turned the final Test on its head to script a sensational 6-run win on Monday.
Team India thus made it 2-2 to share honours, but to many it felt like a series win for Shubman Gill’s young team.
There were many heroes who contributed to the Indian cause through the hard-fought five-Test series. Gill literally led from the front, scoring four centuries to aggregate a record 754 runs in the series; Ravindra Jadeja showed remarkable consistency with the bat, scoring over 500 runs with one century and five fifties and taking 7 wickets; lionhearted pacer Mohammed Siraj engineered the stunning win at the Oval and emerged highest wicket-taker with 23 scalps; Rishabh Pant scored 2 centuries and 3 half-centuries in four Tests; KL Rahul amassed 532 runs with 2 tons; Rahul’s opening partner Yashasvi Jaiswal tallied 411 runs with 2 hundreds.
But none of the above was adjudged as the player with maximum impact in the series.
It was spinning allrounder Washington Sundar who was presented the ‘Impact Player of the Series’ award by the Indian team in the dressing room post the dramatic win on Monday.
It was Jadeja who handed over the coveted medal to Sundar.
“Washy, idhar aa ja bete,” Jadeja said as he cheekily called the 25-year-old Sundar.
“Obviously a great feeling to be playing four games on a trot in a place like England. Always wanted to do well here. As a team, just the way we went about every single day, it was amazing.. The energy we created, especially from a fielding perspective. We were always there for each other,” Sundar said while addressing his teammates after receiving the medal.
Coach Gautam Gambhir earlier congratulated the team for an “outstanding result”.
“So remember you will keep getting better. We keep working on it, we keep improving because if we keep doing that, we can dominate Test cricket for a very long period. People will come and go, but the culture of the dressing room should always be like that. People want to be part of this culture, that it what we want to create,” Gambhir said in the video posted by BCCI.
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An off-spinner and an extremely capable batter, Sundar scored 284 runs in eight innings and bagged 7 wickets.
