England Captain Eoin Morgan is extremely delighted having sent the arch-rivals home without a win, after his side comprehensively beaten Australia in the lone T20 International at Edgbaston on Wednesday, 27th June. Morgan has hailed his side's performance as nothing short of fantastic, having followed the hammering last night after soundly whitewashing their historic nemesis in the ODIs 5-0.
England batted first and on the back of brilliant batting efforts from Jason Roy, Jos Buttler and Alex Hales reached a very stiff looking 221-5 before putting the Australian batting line up across a decent bowling effort, where Adil Rashid's 3/27 in 4 overs helped them restrict Australia to 193-10 despite a fine hand from the opposition captain Aaron Finch.
After the match, a very happy Morgan was quoted saying to Sky Sports as, “It was another fantastic performance. With the bat, we started off outstandingly well, with Jos up to the top of the order for us – he and Jason (Roy) really did get us off to a flier, expressing themselves against that new ball. From there, we managed to kick on, didn’t take our foot off the pedal.”
“We’re lucky at the moment, we probably have six out of the top seven that could open the batting, With the likes of (Jonny) Bairstow coming in at number six and Moeen (Ali) at number seven, you can keep going hard. That really paid off today. We got about 15-20 over par – and we needed them, with Australia coming back hard at us with the bat.”
Morgan also praised Adil Rashid for his match-winning contribution by stating, “Adil held his nerve to throw it up there and make it turn, and make that false shot happen. They probably thought the rate was up, so something had to happen – and that was the reason I brought Adil on at that time.”
Australian head coach Justin Langer knows that the side that played under him in England was bereft of its key players because of various reasons. When he got asked whether them coming back will help in building a side towards the World Cup next year, he replied, “We’ll find out, won’t we? We’ve got young guys coming in against the best one-day team in the world. I’ve been absolutely blown away by how well England are playing. They’re at the peak of their powers right now, and we’ve come up against them. A few of the boys have walked into the jungle, and we’ll see how they go over the next two, three or 10 years.”
(Inputs from BT Sport)
