Ahmedabad (Gujarat) [India], March 21 (ANI): After losing the T20I series against India, England skipper Eoin Morgan is looking at the positives and said there were some “big lessons” for his team throughout the series.
After the blistering half-centuries by skipper Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma, Indian bowlers restricted England to 188/8 to register a 36-run win in the fifth T20I here at the Narendra Modi Stadium on Saturday.
With this win, India clinched the five-match series by 3-2 and now both the teams will face off in the three-match ODI series.
“I think some big lessons, huge amount positives, certainly in the four out of the five matches, we have produced some of the best powerplay bowling that we have in the last couple of years… Learnings from the backend of the games that we have lost and our middle order was not as sharp as we normally are. One of our strengths is how quickly guys get in and adapt to surfaces (but that) did not necessarily happen,” Morgan said in the post-match press conference.
During the match, skipper Virat Kohli and boys displayed a clinical performance in the series decider and England had no answers to what was thrown at them by the hosts.
Kohli’s decision to promote himself as an opener worked wonders in the fifth and final T20I against England as India posted a total of 224/2. Kohli played a knock of 80 runs while Rohit Sharma and Suryakumar Yadav played knocks of 64 and 32 respectively.
Morgan said before the series, he was looking forward to the challenges of playing on turning pitches. “Coming here and wanted to be challenged for us means playing on turning pitches that are completely alien to us because we do not have the opportunity to play on them pretty often. So, that was the challenge I was hinting at before the series. The ball has barely turned. Given the pitches that we have played on, probably bar two, they have been really good to play on,” he said.
With regard to this year’s T20 World Cup, Morgan said that no player so far has his position “nailed down”.
“If any player, including myself, looks that far ahead and thinks ‘my position is nailed down’ then they’re mistaken because we want to improve and continue to get better as the rest of the world progresses. T20 as a game progresses faster than any other format. So, we need to be quite flexible on how we want to improve, and we cannot be rigid,” he said. (ANI)
