Bengaluru: As far as collapses go, one would be hard pushed to find an example more spectacular than what happened to England in the third and final T20 match at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium on Wednesday. Poised for a close finish, England lost eight wickets for the same amount of runs in the space of 18 deliveries to surrender the match and the series. An explanation, for which captain Eoin Morgan had no answer.
“No, I can’t (explain it). We haven’t produced a batting performance as bad as that in two or two-and-a-half years,” said Morgan. “We pride ourselves on our batting, it has been a strong suit for a long time but this series our bowlers have outperformed our batsmen I think,” he said after the match. “Maybe 60% of the game we were competitive but fell away terribly in the end. (We) committed a cardinal sin of losing two in-players in one over and allowed India to build a little bit of pressure. It’s really disappointing. I will take my hat off for India, they put in performances worthy of winning the series,” he added.
A troubling pattern:
Having a string of performances behind them when the team failed to get over the line in crunch situations, Morgan revealed that there might just be a pattern. But not the most obvious one at that. “The pattern does not lie in the last game. You talk about the South African series for instance, that game in Johannesburg, which we could have been 3-0 up in the series. We dropped two catches and then did not bowl particularly well in the end. The other day we should have won it, we didn’t perform well enough and that’s where we should have won the series. When things are going your way, you’ve got to make the most of it. So, that’s more of a pattern,” the skipper stated.
