England captain Eoin Morgan was leading by example in Antigua as he scored 107 to achieve 45 run win for his side. The first of three internationals between the two sides saw Morgan take the limelight as he scored the highly respectable 107 from 116 balls. It was his partnership with Ben Stokes that proved vital, allowing England to set a target of 297 which proved to be simply too high for the West Indies’ batsmen as they found themselves struggling on a slow pitch. Morgan proved his cricketing intelligence when his evaluation of the pitch meant that he realized that England didn’t need to aim as high as they could, but given the conditions, his side could afford to aim for a reasonable yet fairly comfortable number of runs.
Eoin Morgan’s sterling performance was a record-breaking one as he achieved his 5th century in ODI cricket as England captain. Breaking the previous record of four centuries made by Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook. However, despite the obvious achievement Morgan remained a classy winner ignoring the fact he had broken records and instead stating that “contributing to a win is everything”. In the Stokes – Morgan partnership, Stokes also performed very well. Showing maturity and patience not always seen from younger batsmen. Stokes was not enticed into attacking the slow balls from Carlos Brathwaite and instead allowed himself to adjust to the bowling style before really getting into his rhythm. This meant that from his first 43 balls faced Stokes only achieved 24 runs however it was his final 18 balls where he turned the style on achieving 31 runs, including three sixes.
Despite Ben Stoke’s strong batting performance, one thing that was a small surprise was that he did not feature bowling which Morgan later revealed “was not preplanned at all”. Morgan had evaluated that the West Indies spinners were performing quite well in the conditions in Antigua and so decided to bring spinner Joe Root on early instead.
On the contrary, to Eoin Morgan and Ben Stokes, the West Indies batsmen didn’t allow themselves to become accustomed to the various bowling styles and instead adopting more of an aggressive batting approach which backfired fairly badly. West Indies batsmen appeared to be simply unwilling to allow themselves to become familiar with the slow pace of the pitch meaning that most batsmen were out fairly quickly. However, the main reason for the West Indies loss in Antigua came down to their nonpenetrative pace bowling which simply didn’t make the most of the conditions. The home side had the opportunity to get one over England in taking advantage of the conditions as it suited many of their bowlers but they just didn’t seem able to. In addition to this their fielding was also sub-par as they had three dropped catches and one missed stumping. If the fielding was better from the West Indies side it could have been a very different game but they just couldn’t seem to find any sort of rhythm in the game.
Overall it was just a very intelligently played game from the England perspective. The most respect is due to Eoin Morgan for his batting and the bowling performances from the side. Morgan said “I thought the bowling performance that backed up was outstanding, incomplete different conditions than we’re used to” which puts it perfectly. In addition to this Morgan also perfectly summarized the England batting performance as he stated: “We’ve put in a really convincing performance, having lost the toss and having to bat first on a wicket that was very, very tacky.”
To summarize, a solid performance from England’s point of view.
