It was not England’s only blemish in the field: Brook later pulled off a bullseye, direct-hit run-out to dismiss Shivam Dube, but off the very next ball, Hardik Pandya was reprieved when Tom Banton failed to hold onto a much tougher chance, running in from long-on then diving forwards. On a night where only seven runs separated the teams, they were costly misses.
“I’ll hold my hands up and say that I made a big mistake there dropping Samson,” Brook said. “Catches win matches, don’t they? Unfortunately, it just didn’t stay in my hands… Obviously, it’s in the back of your mind. I kept on looking at the scoreboard and he was piling the runs on. I was like, ‘I’m going to have to get 89 tonight.'”
“I probably more look at their two catches that they took, to be honest,” McCullum told Sky Sports, when asked about Brook’s drop. “This is not an easy ground to field at, particularly when the crowd’s as loud as what it is and the ball is sailing everywhere… Axar Patel being able to execute those catches, it was the difference between the game [being won or lost].
“One of those – particularly the one on the boundary rope, if that goes over the rope… The difference was seven runs, there’s six runs in itself. So in the big moments with those two big players, they stood up. Their fielding hasn’t been great throughout the tournament, so to execute it tonight was disappointing from our point of view. Fair play to them.”
“Jof’s had a really good record against Sanju in the past and he’s dismissed him on a number of occasions,” McCullum said. “He obviously created that chance and we put the chance down, and he was able to capitalise on it from there.
“We wanted to try and bowl a touch fuller… Sometimes, here at Wankhede, what feels like a good length is actually short of a length because of the extra bounce that it gets and we just got a little bit caught up with that, and we weren’t quite able to execute.
“When you’ve got a player as powerful as Sanju, he’s able to capitalise on it and he put us under pressure. Again, it’s hard to regian that composure when you’ve got a player who’s going like that.”
England’s fielding at this World Cup had generally been impressive, with the lone exception of their win over Pakistan in Pallekele. They brought back a specialist fielding coach in Carl Hopkinson after dropping a swathe of catches in the Ashes and had reaped the rewards to that point.
But ultimately, tournaments tend to be won by the team that copes best with the pressure and the occasion of a knockout match. On Thursday night in Mumbai, that was India.
Matt Roller is a senior correspondent at ESPNcricinfo. @mroller98
