Morgan clearing the ropes in spectacular fashion

WHEN Eoin Morgan first started playing for England he was very much a sweeper and reverse-sweeper, especially against spin. Square of the wicket was his go-to area.

Even against Afghanistan at Old Trafford on Tuesday he got a reverse sweep away off his 12th ball. He did that because the man on the boundary on the off-side was in front of square, as is the case for most left-handers.

But once Morgan had played that shot, the captain had to move his man behind square. Subsequently, anything that was hit in front of square went for four or six because of the gap in the field. So Morgan was able to go through extra cover with huge confidence.

Remember, too, that since 2012, there has been one less fielder outside the circle in the middle 30 overs, so Morgan knows he has one more area left unattended and does not have to produce so many innovative shots.

It is one of the reasons why scores have gone up and Afghanistan left deep midwicket vacant when their spinners were bowling, so, on a length, Morgan was able to whack it there.

Yes, they were going for six, so it didn’t really matter if the area was unattended, but the confidence to play the shot came from not having a man there.

Old Trafford produced a very good pitch so Morgan didn’t have to be funky. He could hit through the line rather than go square, manoeuvre and sweep as he would on a low, slow surface. He could hit with more confidence through the line.

Morgan was badly dropped on 28 when Afghanistan had only one man out in the deep, but he would not have played the shot had the extra man been out there. Instead he would have gone back to his sweeps. The key is that he’s very smart at manipulating the field.

The England captain’s stance has evolved into a really good powerhitting position. He gets into a stable base and keeps his head down through the ball as well as anyone.

Morgan picks his hands up reasonably high, gets his front leg out of the way and moves into a baseball-style power-hitting stance. But if you look at any of his 17 sixes on Tuesday, his head is down right over the ball at the point of contact.

Morgan has powerful MS Dhoni-like wrists that get real power through the ball, so the strength he used to play all those sweeps in the past now provides power in his straight hitting, with very fast hands through the ball.

It is all a far cry from the crouched stance that Morgan had for about a year when he got really low at the crease as the bowler let the ball go. He had just got into a bad habit, a trigger movement where his backside almost touched the ground, and that is too low because his head was moving far too much. He certainly doesn’t do that any more.

Meanwhile, Brendon McCullum’s eyes lit up when asked if he was surprised his close friend Morgan had gone where no power-hitter had gone before, writes Paul Newman.

“Yes, I was surprised,” said the former New Zealand captain. “But only because I had spoken to him a couple of days before the match and he seemed to be in so much pain with his back that I wasn’t sure he’d be able to play at all.

“What a display of hitting it was. He didn’t do it against just anyone but one of the best spinners in the world in Rashid Khan. And he didn’t do it on one of the smaller grounds but one with longer boundaries in Old Trafford. It was remarkable.”

The words were those of a master admiring the work of his pupil because McCullum provided the example for Morgan to follow when he was a pioneer of the modern 50-over approach during the last World Cup.

Morgan watched one of his best friends in the game at painfully close quarters when McCullum’s

New Zealand annihilated his side in Wellington during that sorry tournament in 2015 and talked to him about how England could possibly follow suit.

Yet, neither imagined it would be Morgan himself rather than one of the many batsmen who have flourished under his enlightened leadership to break a record shared by big-hitting masters Chris Gayle, Rohit Sharma and AB de Villiers.

Morgan has been in highly productive form for some time now but it has almost gone under the radar because of how spectacularly well so many of his charges have batted.

He has, indeed, now hit 122 sixes in the four-year cycle since the last World Cup – more than anyone bar India’s giant Rohit, who has 136. No other batsman worldwide has exceeded 100.

This calendar year, even before Tuesday’s assault on Afghanistan, Morgan had been hitting on average a six every 20 balls in ODIs as opposed to one every 30 or even 40 in previous years. Now he is clearing the ropes once every 13 balls. The admiration yesterday came from inside, as well as outside, the England camp.

“When we assessed things after about 10 or 12 overs we felt 280-300 would be a par score,” said Joe Root, very much the junior partner in a stand of 189 runs where Morgan smashed 143 of them, of Tuesday’s match.

“So to finish the way we did (198 off the last 15 overs) was incredible. I’m trying to find the right word for Morgs’ innings. It was just phenomenal really, but we definitely knew he had something like that in him.

“He plays like that a lot, selflessly. Sometimes he even goes a bit too hard because he wants to set an example and show how he wants us to play. To see him leading from the front towards the business end of what we are trying to achieve is fantastic for us.”

It was, extraordinarily, not long ago that Morgan’s place was being questioned and he said he would drop himself if he felt it was in the best interests of the team.

At the time former assistant coach Paul Farbrace felt compelled to respond that Morgan could make a duck in each of his innings right up until the World Cup and would still be the best man for the job; as he is proving now with his batting, as well as his captaincy.

Then there was that time three years ago when the captain would not lead his team in Bangladesh because of security concerns and former captains-turned-pundits of the calibre of Hussain, Mike Atherton and Michael Vaughan all said he was wrong to do so.

But even then Morgan’s players queued up to back his stance and how right they were to want him to remain at the helm. For a captain who has not always appeared in love with the game, a man who seems just as happy on the golf course or watching horse racing as he does playing cricket, is now proving to be one of the most influential leaders in the history of the game.

And he is doing it, gloriously, by setting the perfect, stunning example.

Eoin Morgan