Spinner Moeen Ali finished off South Africa with a hat-trick as England completed a crushing 239-run victory in the third Test at the Oval on Monday to move 2-1 ahead in the series.<\/p>\n
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Moeen became the first England spinner to achieve a hat-trick in 79 years by dismissing centurion Dean Elgar, Kagiso Rabada and Morne Morkel soon after lunch in a dramatic end to the match.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
England had laboured to bowl out the South Africans in the morning as Elgar continued his gutsy knock, although Toby Roland-Jones continued his fine debut by dismissing Temba Bavuma and Vernon Philander with successive balls.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Moeen finally ended Elgar’s dogged resistance for a 228-ball 136 and the spinner snapped up Rabada with the last ball of his over, both batsmen caught at slip by man-of-the-match Ben Stokes.<\/p>\n
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Moeen completed his hat-trick with the first ball of his next over, although he had to wait for a review to confirm he had trapped Morkel lbw.<\/p>\n
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The dismissal sparked wild scenes as the Oval celebrated its first Test hat-track in its 100th match – and the first by an English spinner since Tom Goddard in 1938.<\/p>\n
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“What a way to celebrate 100 Tests,” said captain Joe Root. “The game was really won by the way we batted in the first innings. The lads got stuck in and got a really good score on what proved to be a really challenging surface.”<\/p>\n
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The touring side, who began the day on 117-4, always knew history was against them, with a team starting the final day of a Test four wickets down having secured draws only three times.<\/p>\n
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For a while it looked like Elgar and Bavuma had not read the script, however, as they increased their fifth-wicket partnership to 108 before Roland-Jones sparked the first flurry of wickets.<\/p>\n
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The debutant seamer took his tally to eight in the match by snaring Bavuma (32) and Vernon Philander (0) lbw with full-length deliveries.<\/p>\n
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With blue skies and little cloud cover, batting conditions proved the easiest of the match and Elgar looked untroubled in reaching his eighth Test century and second against England.<\/p>\n
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But the tourists suffered a further blow to the last ball before lunch when Moeen had Chris Morris caught in the slips by Stokes for 24.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Suitably refreshed, Moeen mopped up the tail. Bizarrely, he was the third bowler, after Stokes and Roland-Jones, to take two wickets with successive balls in the innings before eclipsing his team mates to claim his 18th wicket of the series.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The game proved just as one-sided as the previous two, with England winning at Lord’s by 211 runs before losing at Trent Bridge by 340 runs.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
England will have the momentum going into the final Test which starts at Manchester on Friday as they eye their first home series win over South Africa since 1998.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spinner Moeen Ali finished off South Africa with a hat-trick as England completed a crushing 239-run victory in the third Test at the Oval on Monday to move 2-1 ahead in the series. Moeen became the first England spinner to achieve a hat-trick in 79 years by dismissing centurion Dean Elgar, Kagiso Rabada and Morne Morkel soon after lunch in a dramatic end to the match. England had laboured to bowl out the South Africans in the morning as Elgar continued his gutsy knock, although Toby Roland-Jones continued<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8824,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8823"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8823"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8825,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8823\/revisions\/8825"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}