For skipper Irving Romaine, yesterday’s crushing defeat by England left him to contemplate both his side’s and his own misfortune.

Having come off the field between innings with spirits high, it all went horribly wrong.

And Romaine wasn’t able to do a thing about — instructed by doctors not to bat after suffering concussion as he took a spectacular catch to dismiss top order batsman Ian Bell off the bowling of Malachi Jones.

“It’s sad that I couldn’t go out, I wanted to,” said Romaine afterwards.

“I guess the doctors were being cautious. That was heart-breaking. I’m not saying I would have done anything extraordinary but it just would have been nice to face those bowlers and seen what I could have done.

“When I took the catch I actually fell and hit my head on the ground. I continued to play but the vision was blurred in my right eye and when I came off I was assessed by the physio who passed me on to doctors and they determined I couldn’t go back to play.

“And they’re going to check me again at the hotel tonight to see whether I can train tomorrow. I also suffered a bit of whiplash in my neck.” While the skipper didn’t get to see much of the side’s calamitous batting collapse, he did review the action on TV replays later and admitted there were too many “sloppy shots.”

“I was looking on the replays, because I didn’t get to see much of it live, and basically it seems we played too many big shots too early.

“Against a team like England you just can’t do that, they don’t make any mistakes in the field. They take everything. If there’s a half chance they take it.

“The guys are naturally disappointed in their batting. We came off the field half-way extremely excited, our heads up . . . so now we have to work with all of the batsmen and get back the confidence to take on Zimbabwe on Thursday.

“A couple of the players talked about the lack of pace in the pitch, the ball wasn’t coming on as quick as they expected. But at this level you can’t go out there and bat as we did. We never looked like batting the 50 overs out. “We won’t be too down on ourselves. From the fielding aspect, we did tremendously well, we bowled very well. Apart from one catch Saleem (Mukuddem) dropped it was a good day in the field. And we’ll take positives from that.”

England captain Michael Vaughan said that despite the huge margin of defeat, it had been a worthwhile outing for his players.

“Most of them got something out of the game,” he said.

“It’s always nice to give all of the bowlers four or five overs in a match situation, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.”

And he said there had been no worries even after spinner Dwayne Leverock had helped, at one stage, reduce England to 132 for five.

“There were no concerns really,” he said.

“I had confidence in the bats down the order. Jamie Dalrymple played a tremendous knock and he was helped by a couple of guys further down the order to get us a really good total.”