Never mind the team, this was a night when England’s bowlers were thrashed. They conceded 14 sixes, a number no team has managed against them since they were last in Barbados at the start of last year, and that has only been exceeded four times in their history. Turbocharged by their mighty maximums, and chasing a distinctly under-par score of 171, West Indies duly won by four wickets, with 11 balls remaining.
Along the way one member of England’s team wrote his name into the history books. Adil Rashid became the first Englishman to 100 T20 wickets, the third to make 100 appearances in the format, and by way of footnote was the least expensive of the seven English bowlers here.
He is the first Englishman, and 10th man, to reach triple figures for wickets and the third Englishman – after Eoin Morgan, who played 115 games, and Jos Buttler, for whom this was a 110th – to make as many appearances, and once the stench of defeat has cleared will surely remember the evening with great and deserved pride.
But some of England’s bowling was expensive in both the cricketing and the financial sense, given that Kyle Mayers sent two balls soaring out of the ground via the roof of the Greenidge and Haynes stand and Andre Russell, outstanding with bat and ball on the occasion of his first international appearance for more than two years, landed one on top of the big screen. Add another that was swiftly soaked when the game resumed after a rain break and the box of replacement balls was out more frequently than West Indies batters.
Yet for a while, as Rashid, Rehan Ahmed and Liam Livingstone tied up West Indies with legspin, it seemed England might salvage the game. “It was great to see them operate together,” Jos Buttler said of Rehan and Rashid. “We wanted to see what it looked like, to have two x-factor bowlers like that, especially out here where it might spin. We need to find out if it’s an option here before we get to the World Cup.”
With two balls of the 16th over remaining, the seventh successive over of spin, the hosts needed 43 off 26, and it was not a done deal. Then Rovman Powell thrashed Livingstone’s last two deliveries of the night over the rope, and from there West Indies were unstoppable.
The main issue for England was that while they started their innings superbly they ended it calamitously, losing their last five wickets for six runs in 16 balls to finish with a total well short of their most pessimistic midway imaginings.
“From the position we were in at halfway, 112 for two, to only end up with 171 is an area we could have improved on,” Buttler said. “The wicket definitely got harder and the West Indies adapted, but certainly we need to find a way to score another 20 or 25 runs in that phase, which would have been a really good score on that wicket.”
Phil Salt, who scored 40 off 20 balls, clicked straight into top gear at the start, giving Jos Buttler time to find his rhythm. They put on 77 for the first wicket and plundered 25 runs off the sixth over alone, a bit of a mess from Alzarri Joseph that featured two fours, a six, one significant overstep and two wides, the second of which bounced through the legs of Nicholas Pooran behind the stumps and ran away to the rope. When Will Jacks sent the first two balls of Joseph’s next over soaring over the ropes he had bowled eight legal deliveries and conceded 38 runs.
But things changed as soon as Russell started bowling, and almost immediately worked out the ideal approach. “After bowling the first slower ball to Jos, I realised how much the ball held up in the wicket and tried to pass on the message as quickly as possible to the other seamers,” he said. “Shepherd did it well, Alzarri bowled maybe two or three slower balls per over after that and that’s where we started pulling it back.”
Having conceded 76 in the opening six overs without taking a wicket, and 112 in the first 10, West Indies used their variations to slowly asphyxiate England’s innings. Only one of the last 10 overs of England’s innings brought more than six runs, and as it concluded in a humiliating clatter of wickets, Russell finished with career-best figures of three for 19.
