It’s been a series to remember for Virat Kohli and he will be keen to lead India to another crushing victory when they take on England who are out to restore some confidence in the final Test at Chennai. Join The Roar for live scores of Day 1 from 3pm (AEDT).
India have been dominant this series, taking a 3-0 lead through the first four matches with only a draw in Visakhapatnam preventing them from being in with a chance at the whitewash.
Virat Kohli has been absolutely brilliant for the Indian side, leading them through and pulling their batting out of some sticky situations, rising to the fore with a stunning 235 in Mumbai to help India in taking an innings victory.
England have been completely hapless to stop him and Cheteshwar Pujara for the most part, although Murali Vijay and Jayant Yadav, picked for his bowling did a brilliant job keeping the scoreboard ticking in the last match.
For the tourists, their bowling has been poor with spinners unable to make the breakthroughs required. Adil Rashid has looked out of his depth, and that’s put pressure on others with all-rounder Moeen Ali bowling more than 50 overs in India’s solitary innings in the fourth Test.
On the other side of the coin though, India’s spinners, led by Ravichandran Aswhin and Ravindra Jadeja have been absolutely sensational, picking up wickets almost at will and limiting England’s batsmen, who have crumbled under pressure.
In fact, Ashwin has picked up 27 wickets at 23.7 for the series and when you take into account the first match was a run fest, those numbers could be a lot better.
Prediction
India have been the dominant team all series and despite it being a dead rubber to finish things off, it should be expected they will have the same attitude as they did when polishing off the Kiwis.
Despite India dominating, there are still questions about their batting and with Australia touring in February, they will be keen to sort some of those issues out and have others come into form.
The toss, as it has in every other match this series will have a large weight in the way the game plays out, but at the end of the day it seems like it’s only going to decide the margin of victory for India.
England simply haven’t had the ability to put up enough runs batting first, or batted well enough to stay in the contest batting second.
Dead rubbers might throw up plenty of differing results, but this doesn’t feel like one of them.
India to win comfortably.
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