Sport

England match-winner Shoaib Bashir praised after injury rules him out of series

15 July 2025
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Bashir broke the little finger on his left hand while attempting a caught-and-bowled on day three of the third Rothesay Test and has already been booked in for surgery in the coming days.

But he showed serious fortitude to bat against the 90mph pace of Jasprit Bumrah on Sunday evening and played a brief but decisive role with the ball in an impossibly tense fifth-day finish.

With India creeping towards the finish line on 170 for nine chasing 193 in the final session, he bowled last man Mohammed Siraj via a back-spinning ricochet off the face of the bat.

Having spent the majority of the last two days watching the game unfold with England’s coaching staff, it was a remarkable way for a captivating contest to conclude, securing a 22-run win and a 2-1 lead for the hosts.

“It was great that Bash was able to get that last wicket with everything he had to deal with this week,” said Stokes, who must find a new spinner for the last two Tests.

“He’s 21 years old and he’s got a very badly broken finger. To go out there and bat for us and to be willing to sit there on the bench, waiting for his moment to come on and bowl, I think just proves how much it means to everyone who gets the opportunity to put the shirt on.

“Not even a couple of breaks is going stop anyone getting out there. To finish that game off was written in the stars. It’s not good news for Bash, it’s very disappointing for us as a team and for him, but I think the courage that he showed (was outstanding).

“There would be a lot of people who might not have been brave enough to go out there and face Bumrah, then also put themselves up for wanting to get out there and bowl, and help his team.”

England’s win came on the sixth anniversary of their 2019 World Cup final win at Lord’s, with Stokes, Jofra Archer, Joe Root and Chris Woakes the four survivors from that unforgettable super-over success.

Archer was the man to bowl the most pressurised six balls of England’s white-ball history and those memories inspired Stokes to use him again in the morning session on his first Test outing in four-and-a-half years.

He responded with a couple of magnificent wickets, ripping out Rishabh Pant’s off stump and diving for a brilliant caught-and-bowled off Washington Sundar.

“That was genuinely the reason why we went with it, it felt right in my tummy that Jof was going to do something this morning to break the game open,” he said.

“Gut feel doesn’t always work but those two wickets he got this morning obviously swung the game massively in our favour. The Pant wicket was massive.”

Remarkably, Archer was possibly the only person among the 30,000 in attendance who had not twigged the relevance of the occasion.

“I said to him this morning, ‘you know what today is don’t you?’,” said Stokes with a smile.

“And you know that highlight package of India knocking off 300-odd back in the day with Sourav Ganguly (in 2002). He thought that was six years today.

“I said, ‘no, that World Cup that we won’. He was like, ‘oh that one’. He’s an absolute beauty that boy.”

Just as he did in 2019, Stokes left Lord’s with the player-of-the-match award. He put in a quite incredible shift here, scoring 77 runs across both innings, producing a vital run out and taking five wickets.

He was England’s iron man on day five, bowling 19.2 overs across two lung-busting spells and dismissing key man KL Rahul as well as the defiant Bumrah late on.

“I have got some history of turning up in moments like that with the ball. I was pretty pumped,” he said.

“Bowling to win a Test match for your country on day five…if that doesn’t get you going or up for going out there and putting in for your team, I don’t know what will. The game was on the line; today it was going to be my decision on when I stopped bowling.”