New Zealand media rue loss to England

New Zealand media have likened Eoin Morgan’s England team to Frankenstein’s monster, saying they turned the Black Caps’ own game plan against them to win the World Twenty20 semi-final.

While acknowledging England were the better team and deserved the seven-wicket win in the semis, Kiwi pundits said the seeds of the result were sown when the sides met in Wellington last year at the Cricket World Cup.

In that match, eventual finalists New Zealand trounced England by eight wickets, prompting Morgan’s men to review their style and emulate the Black Caps’ aggressive tactics.

“There was an element of Frankenstein to New Zealand’s departure from the Twenty20 World Cup,” Fairfax New Zealand’s Duncan Johnstone wrote.

“This was an England team that the Black Caps turned into a monster. And the monster came back to destroy them.”

The New Zealand Herald’s said England also mimicked the Black Caps by taking the emotion out of their cricket, delivering “a clinical dissection which wouldn’t have looked amiss in an operating theatre”.

“If the Black Caps could be deemed ‘the masters’, their apprentices trumped them,” he wrote.

He added that “England have morphed into a side with swagger and chutzpah”, since their Wellington humiliation, rating them a good chance of winning the decider on Sunday against either India or the West Indies.

Johnstone said the heavy loss was a “limp” end to a campaign that saw the Black Caps cruise through the group stages undefeated. The New Zealanders have shown they can advance deep into limited-overs tournaments but are yet to reach the next level.