Stuart Broad took a nasty blow on his face while batting on the third day of the 4^th test match against India at the Old Trafford Ground, Manchester. He had come to bat at a stage when England had already taken a substantial lead and thus, quite obviously, he did not look to hang around. He started looking for big shots straightaway.

Broad got a few short deliveries away for boundaries, but, Varun Aaron, who is the quickest Indian fast bowler, bowled him a perfect bouncer which was directed towards his body. He couldn’t get his bat on that and the ball hit him straight on his helmet grill. It was a seriously quick ball and it actually broke the grill to go inside and smack the Nottinghamshire man on the nose.

Broad was down immediately. The blood started flowing out of his nose and there was no way that he was going to bat any further. The English medical staff took him out of the ground and rushed him to the hospital where it was found that there were cuts and fracture in his nose and he would need stitches.

Broad didn’t feature in the test match after that. The match actually got over the same day as after getting dismissed for 367, the English team bundled out India for just 161 runs in the second innings and won by an inning and 54 runs.

It was supposed to be hard for England to get India all out cheaply in the absence of Broad, but, the likes of Jordan and Moeen Ali produced the goods and England got up by 2-1 in the series.

Broad had the figures of 6 for 25 in the first innings and he was named man of the match for that performance.

The South Africa Cricket team secured a big win in the third and last match of the 3-match One Day International series against Sri Lanka. With that win, the Proteas sealed the series by 2-1.

It’s the first time that South Africa has won a One Day International series in Sri Lanka.

The experienced players of the South African side played fantastically well in the series. The opening batsman Hashim Amla, who has recently been named as the skipper of the test side, scored two hundreds, while, AB De Villiers, arguably the best batsman in the world, scored a hundred as well as a fifty. The young guys like Quinton De Kock played their part too.

The South African teams that had toured Sri Lanka before didn’t have any wicket taking spinner. But, this time around, the Proteas were equipped in that department as they had Imran Tahir who is an attacking leg spinner.

Tahir was the major factor for the Proteas in the series. In all the three matches, he took crucial wickets in the middle phase of the Sri Lankan innings and kept South Africa ahead.

In the last match, Sri Lanka was well on track in the chase of 340. They had scored almost 100 in the first 10 overs and had got on top of the visitors, but, that’s when De Villiers threw the ball to Tahir and he made all the difference. With key breakthroughs, the Pakistan-born spinner pushed Sri Lanka’s back against the wall.

Sri Lanka failed to recover from that deadly Tahir spell and eventually couldn’t hunt down that huge target despite a late fight by the captain Angelo Mathews.

Tahir can be extremely useful for South Africa in the test series too which will start next week.