Eoin Morgan on 2019 World Cup last: ‘For a split second I thought we were deceased and buried’


Much has changed approximately cricket, and the world in general, since this time final year. But for Eoin Morgan, some of the benefits of lockdown is that he has at final been ready to sit down down and watch back the 2019 World Cup last in all its harum-scarum grandeur – including the moment when he thought the game was once missing.

England’s World Cup win, a four-year project overseen from start to finish by Morgan, was once the crowning achievement all over a summer that promised to rejuvenate the game in the United Kingdom. The last was once screened concurrently on Sky and Channel 4 – the first time cricket had been free-to-air since 2005 – with more than 8 million viewers tuning in as England prevailed, by the barest of margins, in a dramatic Super Over finish against New Zealand.

Morgan has due to this fact had to receive used an increased level of recognition on the street, posing for selfies and being regaled with individual anecdotes approximately watching the game. And while the ECB’s hopes of building on that success this summer have been severely impacted by the ongoing the coronavirus pandemic, England’s limited-overs captain remains convinced that legacy of that July day at Lord’s can “do wonders for the sport” in this country.

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“I think that the profile of the game has lifted rather considerably,” Morgan said. “Just going off the back of people coming up to me on the street or in a pub or a cafe. It’s not just at home. When we go on holiday there will be someone who flicked over all over the tennis or the Grand Prix or who heard someone shouting next door and wondered what they were watching. It was once just a celebration of sport and people obviously like it when they win trophies. Cricket has certainly turn out to be higher profile and with that that’s how my life has changed. People recognise me more.

“I think in life when it’s important to work harder for anything without reference to if it is a World Cup or a forward defensive, the harder you work the better it feels after. That’s human nature and that is the reason how I feel. But the dramatic nature of the day truly does do wonders for sport. The last is in fact, it’s bigger than cricket, and it’s in fact propelled up as some of the highlights of a sporting day ever in British history That will be around for a long time so it was once probably more satisfying that it’ll continue to be like that.”

Having turn out to be a father in March, Morgan could be forgiven for not having much spare time on his hands – but admitted he had had more than one opportunities to relive the last all over cricket’s enforced shutdown. Despite calmly marshalling his team through probably the most fraught days in the history of the English game, Morgan admitted there was once one point when he briefly thought to be they were “deceased and buried” as Ben Stokes attempted to drag New Zealand’s target inside reach.

“Obviously the final four months has been a bit of a challenge but that’s in fact allowed me to watch the World Cup last – I’ve watched it three times now. And that is the reason allowed me time to sit down back and in fact enjoy it for the first time. I imagine I haven’t had it on DVD or computer from start to finish, full production, but now I have it I’ve watched it three times and it’s been an improbable day to sit down back and watch. It’s still tense right through the whole day each time I watch it back, the ebbs and drift of the game, is a privilege.

“There’s only one [moment of doubt] for me and it probably came to me the second one time I watched it. Jimmy Neesham’s bowling to Ben, he bowls a slower ball, Ben hits it down to long-on and I consider the ball being in the air and you’ll see the trajectory of the ball – and you full polite realize when you hit it up the hill it’s important to absolutely smoke it to hit it for six. And it’s gone high and not rather so long as he’d liked and for a minute I just thought ‘That’s it, it’s over, Ben’s out, we still need 15 an over’ – that’s when I thought for a split second we were deceased and buried.”

Fortunately for England, Trent Boult stepped on the boundary rope, before Stokes scrambled his side to a tie and Jofra Archer completed the resurrection from the last ball of an epic contest.

Despite the fact that Morgan due to this fact took some time to believe his future, he opted to stay on in charge of England’s white-ball teams ahead of back-to-back T20 World Cups. The way forward for this year’s competition, still scheduled to be held in Australia in October and November, remains in doubt because of Covid-19 restrictions, but Morgan will return to action later this month in three ODIs against Ireland, followed by a T20I series against Pakistan later in the summertime.

With his 2019 winner’s medal now parked “on a shelf” at home, Morgan’s focus is on attaining another peak with England – though he admitted topping the country’s maiden 50-over World Cup win would be difficult.

“There hasn’t been a team who have held T20 and 50-over World Cups in order that would be a nice challenge,” he said. “But, realistically, probably out of the next two World Cups, winning one of them would be improbable. To win two would be a bigger achievement than winning the 50-over World Cup. Just because either one of them are absent from home and would favour Australia in Australia and India in India, so you would need to win either one of them to top the 50-overs win.”


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