It was a historic match of sorts as the Green Park, Kanpur was hosting its first ever T20 international match and to go with it, India was celebrating its republic day as well. The script was set for a symbolic Indian win over Englishmen but the team did not play well enough to give their fans the boasting rights. England has an excellent team for the T20 format and is probably the most balanced T20 team in the world at the moment and it showed today. England completely outplayed India in all departments to win the 1st of the 3 T20 matches to be played. England, riding on a brilliant performance by both, the bowlers and the batsmen, won by a comfortable 7 wickets with 11 deliveries still to go to get a lead for the first time on this whole tour across all formats.
England won the toss and invited India to bat first on a placid pitch. England bowlers kept their line and lengths controlled and bowled with a lot of discipline. Opening Pair of Virat Kohli and KL Rahul could not get the start that they would have liked while Kohli got some runs initially but the there was no impetus in the Indian innings throughout. Batsmen kept falling to poor shots and none of them converted the starts they got. Kohli got out on 26 runs; Raina scored 34 while Rahul, Yuvraj, Manish Pandey and Hardik Pandya could muster just 8, 12, 3 and 9 runs respectively. MS Dhoni scored 36* from 27 balls to push the team total to a respectable 147 for 7 in 20 overs.
A target of 148 on a flat track was no way near challenging for the powerful England batting line-up and all they had to do was to bat sensibly. The attacking opening pair of Jason Roy and Sam Billings came out firing on all cylinders as they flayed the Indian seamers without breaking a sweat. They scored 42 runs in just 3.1 overs before getting out in the same over off the bowling of Yuzvendra Chahal. At 43 for 2 in 4 overs, England did not let any more chances off as Joe Root and Eoin Morgan batted with common sense to push India out of the match completely. They added 83 runs together in just 11.3 overs to all but seal the match for England. Morgan got out immediately after reaching his half century but that did not deter England as they cruised to the win without any further loss to go 1-0 up in the series.
India looked a side without a plan in the middle and England is too good a side to let them off easily. England dominated the match completely and it is now upto the Indian team to pull their game up again and bounce back.
Moeen Ali was adjudged the man of the match for his superb bowling effort (4-0-21-2).
Ind Vs Eng, 1st T20, Kanpur
India 147/7 (20/20 overs)
England 148/3 (18.1/20 overs)
England won by 7 wickets with 1.5 overs to spare