Before this game Moeen Ali blamed England’s defeat in the third match of the five-game series on the fact they had to bowl eight overs of heavily punished spin. In this, Moeen’s second game in temporary charge in the absence of the injured Eoin Morgan, they bowled 10 – and this time Adil Rashid, Liam Livingstone and Moeen himself spun the team to victory, with the captain playing as crucial a role with the ball as he had a little earlier with the bat. After ending the match with a demonstration of efficient death bowling that will be as morale-boosting as the result itself, England won by 34 runs to level the series and set up a decider on Sunday night.
Moeen’s 28-ball 63, and in particular his vicious assault on a single Jason Holder over, was instrumental in hauling the tourists to a competitive total, on the same Kensington Oval pitch where they successfully, if narrowly, defended 171 last Sunday. After Brandon King and Kyle Mayers had started the West Indies innings by scoring 64 for the opening wicket, with the latter, opening for his country for the first time in his 16th appearance in all formats, particularly impressive, it was Moeen who made the crucial breakthrough, dismissing both openers in successive overs as West Indies fell into a mid-innings funk.
When Nicholas Pooran eventually hammered Livingstone over long on at the start of the 14th over it was West Indies’ first boundary in 42 balls, and though both Livingstone and Rashid had expensive final overs the damage had been done. Then it fell upon England’s seamers to finish the job, and Chris Jordan and Reece Topley did so admirably.
On Wednesday Moeen had bowled one expensive over and got out for a duck, but this was a very different experience. “In the last game I did nothing – I got hit, I got nought, you’ve got to accept that sometimes,” he said. “Today I’m really happy I could contribute to keeping the series alive. When you’re captain you tend to underbowl yourself and today I thought it was a good situation for me to have a go.”
England’s was an innings built around two half-centuries, with both Jason Roy and Moeen accelerating impressively after pedestrian starts. Roy in particular started awkwardly, surviving a decent review for lbw from the third ball of the innings and presenting Holder with a caught and bowled chance during a second over in which he was wildly unsettled by variations of pace and length.
After four overs he had scored 11 off 18, hitting one boundary, and looked anything but at ease. Just 16 balls later he was raising his bat to celebrate a half-century, having clicked into gear by hitting Sheldon Cottrell past point for a stylish four and then over midwicket and on to the roof of the Greenidge and Haynes Stand. Once at the landmark he retreated back into his shell, scored two off his next eight balls and finally edged to Pooran behind the stumps.
James Vince followed precisely one over and four runs later, top-edging an attempted cut to short third man. It was the seventh time he has scored more than 30 runs in a T20 and he has just one 50 to his name. The 30-year-old has never enjoyed an extended run in the team – more than six years after his debut this was his 16th match, and he has only once played more games in a calendar year than he has managed in the first month of 2022 – but after another wasted start he has yet to produce a compelling reason why he should.
By then Moeen was at the crease, and quietly starting to drag his side to a position of dominance. After 17 balls he had 22 and England seemed well short of par; after 23 balls he had 50 and they had a chance. Holder, who would eventually claim Moeen’s wicket with the first ball of the final over, was hit for four successive sixes as the stand-in captain delivered just the second half-century by an England skipper in 28 matches since August 2020 – Eoin Morgan has led the side in 24 of those games but Jos Buttler, captain for a single outing, scored the other.
