After two games of this series England seemed in a rut. They had followed defeat in the preceding one‑day internationals by losing the first two games in the shorter format, and confidence appeared to have ebbed dangerously. What has happened since then has been nothing so prosaic as a simple shift of momentum, it has been a complete and fundamental redefinition. And having ripped up the form book, England set about shredding the history books as well.
Here once again was a team to strike terror into opponents. England have spoken of using this tour to learn about local conditions, and on this night their batters mastered them. Phil Salt scored a brilliant 119, with Jos Buttler and Liam Livingstone adding 50s, and having been put in to bat they scored a frankly ludicrous 267 for three, the kind of mountainous total that forces chasing teams to take unsustainable risks. No side could be better suited to the task than this West Indies team, but for all that they viciously assaulted England’s bowling this was too much even for them and they finally ran out of wickets three balls into the 16th over, still 75 runs short.
It seems appropriate to run through some of the records that were set here. England’s total was their highest in Twenty20 games, beating by a margin of 26 their effort against New Zealand in Napier four years ago. It was the highest score achieved by a Test-playing nation after being put in to bat, beating Australia’s 263 for three against Sri Lanka in 2016 – indeed only once, when Afghanistan scored 278 against Ireland in 2019, has a Test-playing team bettered it batting first. And along the way Phil Salt scored the highest total achieved by an Englishman in the format, beating Alex Hales’s 116 against Sri Lanka in 2014, to become the first player from his country to score two T20 centuries. Just four days ago he had not scored any.
Earlier on Tuesday Salt was unsold in the Indian Premier League auction, which seemed puzzling at the time and became even more so with every punishing, perfectly timed swing of his bat. Salt’s role in the side is to set the tone, and on this occasion he did it by hitting the debutant Matthew Forde for six and four off successive deliveries in the first over.
By the time he got out, having faced just 57 balls, only nine remained and England already had 246. He scored 88 runs in boundaries alone, giving fielders little to do except watch the ball whistle above or beyond their reach before turning to collect it.
If the experiment with also asking him to keep wicket was not an overwhelming success, Salt’s place at the top of England’s batting order can no longer be in doubt. In their past two matches England have produced two of the six biggest opening partnerships in their 182-game T20 history, Salt and Buttler combining to score 115 on Saturday followed by 117 here.
This was an improvement in more ways than one, being also the fastest of all England’s triple‑figure opening stands, and the only opening partnership in the nation’s history that is at all comparable in terms of score while also being quicker was the 77 the same players racked up in the opening game of the series in Barbados.
Half-centuries for Buttler, also equalling his achievement in Grenada three days earlier, and Livingstone, just the second of his international T20 career and his first for two and a half years, added further sheen to a superlative batting display. No batter scored more slowly than the captain, and his strike rate was 189.65.
West Indies’ only chance of overhauling England’s huge target was to score wildly from the start without losing wickets, and they ticked one of those boxes.
It took them just 40 balls to reach triple figures, where it had taken England 52, and including one that came off Rovman Powell’s legs rather than his bat at that stage fully 47.5% of those deliveries had gone to, or indeed over, the rope. The issue was that 10% of them – including, gallingly, the first of the innings – had brought wickets.
There was a point where the sheer number of boundaries, the pure power exhibited by these players, became almost comical. In the end precisely 70 boundaries were scored, off just 213 legal deliveries. But if England could not stem the flood of runs, their opponents could not stop the flow of wickets, and eventually Andre Russell emerged as West Indies’ final hope. Having reached his half-century with, inevitably, consecutive boundaries off Reece Topley, he was caught in the deep off the next ball. The series will be decided on Thursday, but England’s trajectory suddenly seems set.
