Ball One – If he can’t stand the heat, Baker should be kept out of the kitchen
The first over of the day provided a microcosm of just how far Sonny Baker has to go before he converts enthusiasm and talent into genuine Test class. Four byes off the first ball, a four off the second and an easy single to allow Phillips to retain the strike off the sixth, with NZ raising the 300 and seizing the initiative.
Pace will often get him out of trouble because the wickets column won’t often be empty, but he’s going to go for plenty and that doesn’t include the byes and leg byes resulting from his wayward line.
By all means, England should pick bowlers on potential, but they need some experience around them. This may not be the match to blood as raw a bowler as this, particularly with no spinner to wheel away at one end while the quicks rotate on Third Man duty and get coached by the man with the towel and the water bottle.
Ball Two – England’s shameful morning
The well-stocked House of Horrors that provides accommodation for the worst of English cricket cannot contain anything as gruesome as the shambolic conception and execution perpetrated by Joe Root and ten others in the first session of play. It is no reflection on the man himself, but no other Test team in the world (perhaps ever) would have a bowler of Jacob Bethell’s style and calibre propelling a new ball at a number nine before midday.
Even if ‘the plan’ (if one can grace the farrago with such a term) had worked, it would have been unedifying, but a schoolboy XI would have executed it with more nous and more discipline.
Well played Glenn Phillips, out for a round and beautifully constructed 100. Whether Matthew Fisher should have celebrated his slog to deep midwicket, caught competently by Emilio Gay, with such exuberance was questionable, but I felt like joining in because at least I didn’t have to watch the shambles any longer.
Ball Three – F… it Duckett!
It is hard work bowling at The Oval, but it rewards subtlety and discipline – or, at minimum, punishes them less. Watching Matt Henry’s economical run up, grooved action and crafty variations of line and length reminded me of no bowler more than Surrey’s Dan Worrall, who has bowled outstandingly at this ground over many seasons.
Another of the Anglo-Aussie’s attributes is patience, knowing that a mistake will come and, when it does, the delivery has to maximise the opportunity and not sail well wide of the off stump or go ballooning overhead.
One of the many, largely unrecognised, impacts of Bazballing at the top of the innings, is that it can induce impatience in a bowler, leading to them striving for the magic ball because even the good ones are travelling. Ben Duckett and Harry Brook may be the only true believers left in this XI, but Duckett has raced to 36 and looks far more at ease than he was dropping a sitter a couple of hours earlier.
Until, in this car crash of a day, he’s run out by two yards…
Ball Four – What a Gay day!
Rather like a buzzing Lieutenant George, I feel I ought to request permission to get really rather excited about Emilio Gay.
I had seen him before his selection for the Test team playing at domestic level, but what struck me then was his movement in the field – speed, grace and anticipation the standout characteristics. The last time I noticed that so clearly in a batsman, it was a young Mark Waugh and before that, a young David Gower. Gay has some way to go before he reaches the heights of those greats, but his start is highly encouraging.
What underpins his game (and that of those forebears) is, of course, balance, a gift rare at this level of abundance and common across many sports and even the performing arts. It promotes grace and leads to an optical illusion that is so strong it cannot be blinked away – that ethereal extra time to play a shot, to make a decision. Nobody exemplified that more than John McEnroe in his pomp or Diego Maradona, a wild man, perfectly calm in the mud and bullets of 80s football.
Gay is working out his game and is still, rightly, thinking hard about his work. In time, he will need to think less and that is when the autonomic system – characterised by being in ‘The Zone’ – will take over and he will flow into his shots. He might never get there – but he has a chance. And not many do.
He was done in the end shying away from Will O’Rourke’s extreme pace, having just crossed 50. He won’t have seen that often in Division Two of the Champo, but he’ll learn. Glenn Phillips can tell him how.
Ball Five – Going back to Joe Root: a single day Odyssey
A few years ago, at the Tate Gallery, a Picasso exhibition included a closed off space in which a short grainy black and white film showed the great painter in his studio daubing a canvas with fat brushes. An animal would emerge before us and, just as soon, disappear in more heavy strokes – until another formed briefly, and was just as swiftly buried. Eventually, he stopped and there was bull or a bird or whatever. Above all, there was a Picasso.
What struck me most was that it all looked so easy, so natural, the economy of effort giving him the air of a man strolling along a path, the hat on the side of the head.
Joe Root has had that demeanour this afternoon, his canvas The Oval, the bat his brush. He is no radical innovator (perhaps that’s more Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, whose ability to hit the ball anywhere in the 360 degree arc is more true to Cubism than Root’s pushes, cuts and drives) but he knows his game, and the game, so well that he controls their intersections with complete mastery.
He started the day back in his miserable captaincy job: he finishes it in his happy place, knocking it here and there, as he was born to do.
As ever, it’s a surprise when Root’s out, but no surprise that it’s the aforementioned Henry who scramble-seams one into his front pad as he half-shoulders arms. The England captain saw enough move just like that in the New Zealand innings from the vantage point of first slip, so he should have been wise to that possibility – but he wasn’t.
Ball Six – England need skills, inspiration and direction
On another day of Test cricket that falls short of its best, New Zealand have outplayed England comprehensively to lead by 169 runs with one end open in their opponent’s long tail. None of England’s more experienced batters have bested Joe Root’s disappointing 46, so the newer players have had nothing to bat around.
In the field, they were embarrassing and rudderless, especially to Phillips and Kyle Jamieson (who looks like the second attempt after things went a bit awry with the first one, Erling Haaland) who were both prepared to take a few bruises to make a few runs.
The Kiwis deserve to be ahead in the match, but they really haven’t had to do too much (ex Phillips wearing a few Archer thunderbolts) to get there. And, if they can convert their ascendancy into a win and square the series, they’ll go to Trent Bridge favourites, especially if Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson are still persona non grata.
That English cricket can fold in the cauldron of an Ashes series Down Under is one thing – disintegrating at home to New Zealand, themselves unexpectedly shorn of Kane Williamson, is quite another. But they haven’t – yet.