"Our execution was nowhere near as good" - Morgan on England's death-bowling

England’s white-ball skipper Eoin Morgan wants his bowlers to get better at death-bowling after West Indies almost pulled off a miraculous run-chase in the second T20I at Kensington Oval, Barbados. The hosts needed 61 off 18 balls with two wickets in hand and that’s when Romario Shepherd and Akeal Hosein went berserk and smoked Chris Jordan and Saqib Mahmood all around the park.

West Indies eventually lost the game by just one run as England managed to level the five-match series 1-1. Something similar happened against New Zealand in the semifinal of the 2021 T20 World Cup but England weren’t as lucky as they were on Sunday (January 23). New Zealand needed 57 to win off the final four overs in Abu Dhabi and Jimmy Neesham and Daryl Mitchell hunted down the required runs with an over to spare.

"Every team in the world is trying to get better at it. It is the hardest job in T20 cricket, death-bowling. Conditions did get a little bit better towards the end - the ball did skid on as opposed to our innings in the first innings - but ultimately, we need to find better ways of going about it. Our execution was nowhere near as good as we would like," said Morgan.

With 61 required off 18 balls, Jordan was smacked for three sixes in the 18th over. Reece Topley only conceded eight runs in the penultimate over and left 30 runs for Saqib Mahmood to defend in the final over. The paceman was slammed for two fours and three sixes by Hosein and ended up leaking 28 runs in the last over. 

When asked about why England bowlers weren't trying to bowl yorkers, Morgan said: "We are, we're just getting it wrong. The majority of our plan today was to bowl yorkers, use the long side, and we missed. That's being brutally honest. The guys are always honest with executing in order to try and move on (and to) identify areas that we can get better - this is definitely one of them.

"They're games that you want to play in. Looking back at the build into the [2021] World Cup, we didn't play in many tight games to work on our death hitting and our death-bowling, so today is a good example of that. The more experience, hopefully, the better we'll get at executing."

The third T20I will be played on Wednesday (January 26) at the same venue.