5 peculiar highlights from England’s latest action-packed win over New Zealand

3 minute read

Back in the mists of time, whenever the digital rights for Test matches were last agreed, someone decided that the free YouTube highlights for a day’s play should be just 10 minutes long. That was when a day’s play was a fifth of a Test match though. Surely now they could be at least a quarter of an hour?

This is modern cricket. You don’t get many days and you don’t get many overs in those days, but somehow they pack way more in.

The second Test between New Zealand and England at the Basin Reserve was a pretty good example. Here are five things we very much enjoyed from the two-and-a-bit days it lasted.

1. Harry Brook’s attitude to England being 50-4

The image above is actually from 111-4, but it was much the same thing at 50-4: a cheeky little skitter down the pitch so he could slot a seam bowler over extra cover for six.

Harry Brook is a quite ludicrous cricketer who’s very definitely already on the slide – if only because what other direction could he go?

2. Gus Atkinson’s hat trick appeal

It’s fair to say Atkinson was pretty confident on this one – which is just as well because the wicket itself didn’t in fact fall until the third umpire had taken a look, by which point everyone had already left the field.

There are plenty of pros to the decision review system, but this is a thing we’ve disliked about it pretty much since day one. The great thing about wickets is that they provide that instant emotional impact. When the instant is stretched over several minutes of ambiguity, you piss away an awful lot of excitement.

3. Joe Root’s batting stance on 98

In a way this is a familar sight, but we really shouldn’t get too numb to how silly it is to stand like this when a seam bowler is flinging the ball right at you – doubly so when you only need two runs for a hundred.

We like to think that directly behind Tom Blundell there’s a long stop fielder squatting down in the same position with no pads or gloves to form some sort of batter-focused tribute to the famous ‘Road to Homo Sapiens’ diagram.

4. Tom Blundell’s whitewash

Quite a lot of New Zealand’s second innings comprised Tom Blundell lobbing wind-assisted straight sixes off Shoaib Bashir. One of them put a hole in the bedsheet that they use as a sightscreen in Wellington.

5. Ben Duckett’s slip catch

Blundell’s innings came to an end when slip fielder Ben Duckett caught him not at slip.

This is where he set off from:

And this is where he took the catch:

Note in particular the direction in which he’s diving to take that catch.

Yes, both those images are taken from the same delivery.