Saqib Mahmood conceded 28 off his final over, when tasked with defending 30. © AFP
In the second T20I of the five-match series between England and West Indies in Barbados, the hosts needed 61 in just three overs and with only two wickets left in the shed to script a heist. The equation then came down to 30 off the final over. However, Akeal Hosein landed two boundaries and three sixes before the West Indies fell short by a solitary run. Chris Jordan gave 23 runs in the 18th over while Saqib Mahmood ended up with the chastening experience of getting clubbed for 28 runs in the last over.

To make matters worse for the tourists, this wasn't the first time the bowling has come under scrutiny in the slog overs. In the T20 World Cup semi-final in Abu Dhabi last year, New Zealand required 57 off just four overs, but the target was chased down with an over to spare. Incidentally, until then, in T20Is, no team had scored so many runs in the last four overs to chase down a target.

Eoin Morgan, the England skipper, admitted that his side need to improve its execution in the slog overs. "Every team in the world is trying to get better at it," he said after the team's one-run win. "It is the hardest job in T20 cricket, death-bowling. Conditions did get a little bit better towards the end - the ball did skid on as opposed to our innings in the first innings - but ultimately, we need to find better ways of going about it. Our execution was nowhere near as good as we would like," he added.

Morgan noted that the plan was to bowl wide of the off-stump and use the long side of the boundary to restrict the opposition. Unfortunately for England, only the tall Reece Topley succeeded in executing the plans. The left-arm bowler bowled wide of off-stump, alongside mixing up his lengths to keep it down to just eight runs in the penultimate over.

"We are, we're just getting it wrong. The majority of our plan today was to bowl yorkers, use the long side, and we missed. That's being brutally honest. The guys are always honest with executing in order to try and move on [and to] identify areas that we can get better - this is definitely one of them.

"They're games that you want to play in. Looking back at the build into the [2021] World Cup, we didn't play in many tight games to work on our death hitting and our death bowling, so today is a good example of that. The more experience, hopefully, the better we'll get at executing," he said.