Batsman calls for each side to have one DRS review per innings in T20 matches

After five matches, three weeks and an endless seam of hysterically-received sky-bound swipes of the white ball it is finally hit or bust for England in Bangalore. The deciding T20 international today of this gripping three-match endgame offers a chance of vindication at the last after an Indian winter that has at times been something of a trial.
The minutely-engineered M Chinnaswamy pitch promises a run-feast. And England will take to the field with a genuine itch to win a series. Joe Root suggested the team feels it really should have won already.
“It’s pretty straightforward where we are in the series and what we need to do,” Root said, addressing the gathered media in the upper floors of the rambling Chinnaswamy, a giant doughnut ring of a cricket ground that promises to produce fittingly climatic noise on tonight. “It’ll be pretty good to come back from the other night. It was obviously very frustrating and disappointing that it finished the way it did but we’ve got an opportunity now in the final game of the series.”
Root also took the opportunity to offer his own view that T20 internationals should have one DRS review per side, as 50-over cricket does, a suggestion that may well be taken up at the ICC’s four-day quarterly meeting in Dubai, which kicks off tomorrow.
“I know you want to keep the speed of the game but with it being such small margins and so important for us to get things right. With bat or ball, if you miss your yorker you go out of the park. It’s just as important to get the right decisions from the umpires as well. It would be quite nice to see maybe even one review for either side.”
Attempts by local press to gouge out any potential ill-feeling towards umpire Chettithody Shamshuddin, who will stand again in Bangalore despite some mistakes in Nagpur, met an impressively dead bat.
Root did refer to “decisions that went against us throughout the game”, the worst of them the Virat Kohli lbw shout given not out, after which he scored 13 off his next five balls; and Root’s own triggering in the final over after edging the ball into his pad. Beyond that England are keen not to make it personal.
“I have no problem with him umpiring any of our future games. As a player you’re going to make mistakes and as an umpire you’re going to do exactly the same. I don’t think it would be right to single him out as a person at fault for that game. I’m just trying to think of the best solution and I don’t want it to overshadow the way India bowled at the end. Bumrah deserves a lot of credit for the way he held his nerve at the back there.”
England trained under the lights yesterday, working on the usual pared back basics in this form of the game. Root, Sam Billings and Jason Roy put on another compelling display of hitting against some eager net bowlers. Liam Plunkett and Chris Jordan could be seen bowling first full and then short. Paul Farbrace put Jos Buttler through a keeping drill using a red plastic garden chair, even as the uniformed ground staff pulled the silver plastic covers across the outfield.
That pitch, then. A local paper carried a special report yesterday featuring the loquacious head groundsman of the Chinnaswamy, K Sriram, who came armed with some impressive numbers. “We expect a score of around 170,” Sriram said of the first international match on his relaid square and outfield.
Sriram’s prized Clegg Impact Hammer pitch detector has indicated a moisture content of 190, on track for a feather-bed. In the event of any rain his outfield will drain 36 times faster than the speed of normal gravity, powered by “state of the art subsurface aeration”.
All of which will be good news for the top order players on both sides after a trickier surface of Nagpur, which made for an excellent low-scoring game. To date no batsman in either of these power-packed lineups has quite got away, the most rapid sustained scoring being Morgan’s own brisk fifty in the stroll to victory at Kanpur.
England are likely to be unchanged, with Plunkett for Liam Dawson a possibility. India might just give the explosive Rashib Pant a game, most likely in place of Manish Pandey, who has failed. Either way this is likely to be the most spectacularly IPL-ish match of this series at the home of Royal Challengers Bangalore, home franchise of Virat Kohli, Lokesh Rahul and, for one season, for England pacer Chris Jordan.
As England ran through their drills the disco lights were already being trialled, the PA clearing its thunderous throat. For five or so of this England team tonight presents another chance not just to seal the series but to produce a last-minute pitch for a gig here in the spring, with the IPL auction still apparently scheduled for Saturday in Bangalore, perhaps even in the current England team hotel.
“I’m sure the guys entering the IPL auction will be desperate to make their mark in India and show the people here what they can do,” said Root, who is much in demand himself, but for now focused solely on that series end and a chance to right a slightly bruised sense of sporting justice.