England bowlers had done exceedingly well to bring the equation to 19 off the last over in Sunday’s World T20 final but some manic hitting by Carlos Brathwaite off Ben Stokes clinched it for West Indies.
Skipper Eoin Morgan sympathised with the bowler, blamed the batting and lauded the team for its show in the tournament.
Excerpts:
On the result: It takes some beating, definitely. One of the other games I can relate to that’s been like this is South Africa. At the halfway stage you like to think that anything is possible, and you get it down to the wire and I’m sure the South Africans felt the same after we chased down 230.
On England’s performance with the ball: I can’t fault anything we did with the ball today, we were exceptional. There was a tremendous amount of belief at the halfway stage that we’d put a score on the board and we were right in the game. But we let ourselves down tremendously with the bat, I thought we were terrible, probably 40 runs short, it was a 180-190 wicket. I thought both sides let themselves down with the bat but in the World Cup you make what you can of it.
On four sixes by Brathwaite: It’s possible, it just happened. Cricket can be a cruel game, we did extremely well with the ball, at no stage did West Indies get ahead of where we’d have liked them to be; in fact it was going the other way. Adil (Rashid), (Liam) Plunkett, (Chris) Jordan, (David) Willey at the start then coming back for two wickets was outstanding.
On Stokes: It’s quite simple from my point of view. He is going to be devastated, and it’ll take its toll over the next couple of days, but we share everything that we do; we stick together as a side, we share the pain, we share the success and in the future.
I personally think we will, this side is at the very beginning of its progression, it’s actually frightening to think what we can do if we achieve our potential, but certainly tonight we share the pain.
On Joe Root: Joe is an incredibly talented cricketer, he keeps things incredibly simple, great temperament, able to adapt to any situation. Today he controlled himself brilliantly while we were losing wickets. On the team as a whole: We are proud of the players, regardless of what happened today.
Today was about letting ourselves go out and play with the freedom that we have trusted ourselves with all tour. This is the beginning of something I am hoping will be special, we have a great amount of talent to work with and I hope we can keep this group of players together as long as we can and look to the future
Published 04 April 2016, 20:07 IST