Eoin Morgan has criticised England for sending out an assistant coach to their pre-match press conference, instead of a senior member of their group, questioning whether they were “shirking responsibility”.

The day before their penultimate match of the tournament against the Netherlands in Pune, England sent fielding coach Carl Hopkinson out to answer questions from the media in the pre-match press conference. Hopkinson is a former player who played for Sussex between 2000 and 2009, and has been an assistant coach with England men of five-and-a-half years.

Speaking on Sky Sports in the build up to the match, Morgan expressed his surprise at Hopkinson being assigned media duties: “I was very surprised and a little bit shocked by it to be honest,” he said. “Bear in mind the thought process that goes behind it, when you sit in in meetings as a leader, as a captain or as a head coach, you make those decisions in the side and when things are going wrong, you need absolute clarity and direction.

“You talk about how people are media trained and what to expect and what is needed when you talk about messaging in interview process, you naturally turn to senior players or your head coach. You have to front up and in certain instances you could look at it and say: ‘are they shirking responsibility?'”

England have lost their last five games in the competition and are desperately trying to secure Champions Trophy qualification. In the press conference, Hopkinson fielded questions about England’s messaging, saying ” The messaging is always the same and has been ever since Mott and Jos took over. Everybody knows how we like to play as a team. We like to be aggressive. We like to be on the front foot. And I don’t think that messaging has changed.”

But Morgan questioned whether sending Hopkinson out to face the media was a sign that the messaging was flawed in itself.

“At the moment it’s a sinking ship,” he said. “And you need people to take responsibility and take responsibility for your actions. That’s just part and parcel of the job. So it very much surprised me seeing Carl Hopkinson being rolled out yesterday.

“If it was a Ben Stokes or Joe Root, just a senior voice within the changing room, you would say: ‘right this is the messaging in the changing room, this is how it’s going to work.’ But you very rarely would send out and assistant coach, which there are three in this group, you would very rarely turn to an assistant coach to give a strong message when the team needs it.”

In the event, England put in a better performance with the bat having opted to bat first in Pune – largely thanks to a century from Ben Stokes and a fifty from Chris Woakes. They set the Netherlands 340 to win.

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