The day before the third and final one-day international Jason Roy told a mixed media gathering at Eden Gardens that England would be “taking the positives” from their two defeats to date, the bare-knuckle bowler-pummelings in Pune and Cuttack. Shortly afterwards, in a flagrant breach of international sports-speak code, Roy was asked by a curious Indian journalist to describe these “positives” he had identified. What were the positives exactly? And could he rank them in any specific order?
Roy looked a bit stumped, as well he might given this is perhaps the first time in modern sporting history any attempt to peer behind the veil of “the positives” has been made. A day later, with Roy scoring a third quietly brutal half-century in England’s last-ball victory, the positives looked a lot more keenly etched, the taking of them a much more obvious business. England’s bowling has been the only major concern in India, as it has throughout the transformation of the batting lineup into a cloudless attacking machine. At times Eoin Morgan has seemed exasperated by the inability to stick to a line and length under pressure on flat tracks against an intimidating middle order.
Related: India v England: third one-day international – as it happened
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