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As Akash Deep was included in the playing XI for the second Test against England at Edgbaston, Birmingham, he knew the enormity of the honour he was given. The 28-year-old replaced the best bowler of the current generation, Jasprit Bumrah, for the second time in his career and rose to the occasion, helping India register a historic win at the venue.

Akash sent a sense of reassurance in the dressing room with his accurate line and length and helped Indian bowling exorcise the demons of the first Test at Headingley, Leeds. The 28-year-old came as a breath of fresh air in the Indian bowling attack, which was deemed lifeless without Jasprit Bumrah.

However, Akash shut the critics by making the ball dance to his tunes and forcing the England Bazballers to kneel against quality bowling. Akash set the tone by wreaking havoc with the new ball in the first innings, dismissing dangerous Ben Duckett and Ollie Pope off consecutive deliveries. He further helped India break the massive 303-run stand between Harry Brook and Jamie Smith by getting rid of the former.

ENG vs IND 2nd Test Day 5 Highlights

He further dismissed Chris Woakes for 5 (17) to register figures of 4/88 in the first innings – his best ever in a single innings. Later in the second innings, Akash was once again up to the task as he helped India get all-important scalps of Duckett and Joe Root before stumps on Day 4.

The magical delivery to Root

The delivery to Root in particular grabbed everyone’s attention as it sharply moved away after pitching and outfoxed the England batter, who had his stumps rattled while attempting to flick it on the leg side. Legendary India batter Sunil Gavaskar was mighty impressed with Akash’s delivery and mentioned that to get Root out like that was special.

“I’ll tell you what, this is a delivery which he will remember forever because look, batsman as great as Joe Root, to get him out with such a delivery, magnificent stuff,” said Gavaskar on Sony Sports.

Furthermore, Gavaskar also mentioned how Akash used his T20 skills to perfection to get rid of Jamie Smith in the second innings, who was once again proving to be a thorn in India’s flesh with his belligerent strokeplay. The England wicketkeeper decided to take on India’s short-ball ploy as he whacked him for a couple of sixes.

Use of T20 tricks in Tests

However, Akash mixed his pace to perfection on the following delivery and bowled him a slower bouncer, which resulted in Smith getting holed out on the boundary. Reflecting on the dismissal, Gavaskar stated that the Indian seamer used the tricks of the T20 game to get rid of Smith.

“Well, that again is the benefit of having played the T20, the IPL. So, look, the shots that the batters play today is all because of the T20 game, whichever leagues they’re playing, because they get the confidence. They know that if they middle, even half of me it, it’ll go for a 6. So once you have that belief in yourself, then you can try it in a major game like a test match as well. And that is what Akash Deep did He bowled normal pace deliveries, then the slower delivery. Again, super thinking and deserving of a wicket of a very, very good player,” he said.

Earlier, Akash also dismissed Ollie Pope with a slower delivery in the second innings, who chopped the ball back onto his stumps and left Harry Brook flabbergasted with a vicious delivery which came back in sharply after hitting a crack. He finally put curtains on the England innings by getting rid of Brydon Carse and set up a massive 336-run win for the team.

Akash finished the match by registering his maiden five-wicket haul and ten-wicket haul, finishing with figures of 10/187 – the best by an Indian bowler at Edgbaston, Birmingham. Having bowled a match-winning spell at Edgbaston, Akash has sent a stern warning to England for the remaining three games, as the Indian bowling is only going to get better with the addition of Bumrah.

– Ends

Mexico fought back from conceding an early goal to beat Mauricio Pochettino’s United States and defend their Gold Cup title in Houston, Texas.

Former Tottenham and Chelsea manager Pochettino saw his team gain a fourth-minute lead through Crystal Palace defender Chris Richards. He headed in from Sebastian Berhalter’s free-kick, with the ball bouncing down off the underside of the crossbar and just crossing the line.

But the US advantage only lasted 23 minutes as Fulham striker Raul Jimenez equalised with a first-time shot on the turn into the roof of the net from eight yards out, following Marcel Ruiz’s intelligent reverse pass.

Jimenez celebrated the goal by sitting on the turf with a ‘Diogo J 20’ shirt in front of him as a tribute to his former Wolves team-mate Diogo Jota, who died in a car crash on Thursday aged 28.

Mexico dominated the second half and got the winner in the 77th minute with a diving header from Edson Alvarez, although it had originally being ruled out for offside before the video assistant referee showed the West Ham defender was onside.

The Gold Cup featured 16 nations, 15 from North and Central America as well as Saudi Arabia, who had been invited to compete. All but one of the matches have been held in the United States, with the other one staged in Vancouver, Canada.

Pochettino took Tottenham to the Champions League final in 2019 and had been appointed boss of the US national team in September 2024, four months after being dismissed by Chelsea.

It was raining hard in Birmingham on Sunday morning. A weight of great black clouds broke over the city while it was feeling its way into the day. On the streets people pressed themselves together under the cover of bus stops and awnings: revellers off to the Queens Heath pride festival, heavy metal lovers making their way home after Black Sabbath’s farewell gig at Villa Park the previous evening, and cricket supporters bound for the ground, most of them with last-minute tickets, split between anxious Indian and wry English fans, the only people in the city who were happy enough to be getting wet.

The bad weather was about the only way England were going to get out of this match with a draw. A team who have spent three years learning how to do the improbable were in no position at all to attempt the unremarkable and bat out the match, even after the rain had washed out the first hour and a half of the day.

Their attempt to play out the remaining 80 overs of the game was as good as up by the lunch break, broken by a superb spell of fast bowling by Akash Deep, who had played only seven Tests before this, but is 28 and has spent years in Indian first-class cricket learning how to get every last bit out of unhelpful pitches such as this one.

Deep took as many wickets in this match as England’s four quicks managed between them and gave them one long lesson in how to bowl in their own conditions. He produced more good balls in his first spell on Sunday than they had between them in the match. One of them got Ollie Pope, dismissed playing the sort of janky defensive shot that makes people question his spot in the order all over again, and another did for Harry Brook, who was beaten by a jaffa that nipped back off a crack and smacked into his thigh bone.

So in came Ben Stokes, England’s last hope now the clouds had blown over. Strange to say about a man who’s performed so many wonders, but it felt like no hope at all. Stokes is just the sort of man you might hire to slay the Nemean lion, but it’s less obvious that he’s the one you would send in with a shovel to muck out the Augean stables.

Time was when he could do it for you. It’s easy to forget, among everything else he’s done for England, that he’s played a series of rearguard innings over the years for captains before him, 66 off 188 balls against New Zealand in 2018, 62 off 187 against India at Trent Bridge later that same year.

But anyone who’s watching knows those days are a way behind him. On Sunday, Stokes managed just over 90 minutes of batting. There was one of those familiar pull shots against Prasidh Krishna, like a lumberjack making the last cut on a California redwood, and a couple of crisp glances to fine leg, but that was about the best of it.

He was, he always is, bamboozled by Ravindra Jadeja’s way of bowling into the rough outside off stump. It’s like watching a grizzly bear try to solve a Rubik’s Cube. He was eventually done, in the last over before lunch, by one of Washington Sundar’s innocuous off-breaks.

Stokes has such a big influence as captain that it goes almost unnoticed that he has so little influence as a batsman. He has made one century in the past three years, and that was a bar-room brawl in a losing cause against Australia at Lord’s, when he was furious that Alex Carey had run out Jonny Bairstow.

Since then, he’s scored six fifties in 33 innings, none bigger, or better, than the 80 he made in the first innings of an English victory in Christchurch last November. His batting average was 39 in the first year of his captaincy, but was 28 last year and is just 19 in this one.

Among all the other records Shubman Gill set this week, he outscored Stokes by 397 runs in the match, which is the largest gap between two captains in the history of Test cricket. Gill, of course, doesn’t have to do any of his team’s bowling. Stokes was superb with the ball at Headingley just last week.

For all the hard work he’s put into that over the past 12 months, you wonder how he would be batting now if he had been willing, or able, to put the same sort of time into the other side of his all-round game. He didn’t play at all for Durham this year and, aside from his England commitments, he’s had exactly one red ball innings in the past year.

It’s asking a hell of a lot of him to bat as well as he bowls, and bowl as well as he leads, but that’s what England need.