3 minute read
This website was born in the drab age of “chief executives’ pitches” where runs were plentiful and the game inched along like a tardy slug. We hated it – but fortunately the world moves on. We now find that in an era of two-day Tests, it’s actually quite interesting to watch a team spend almost an entire day going pretty much nowhere.
Sometimes Tour de France riders warm up on stationary bikes before a stage. This seems like an entirely mad thing to do when you’re about to ride a couple of hundred kilometres and scale multiple mountain passes. Save your strength, lads! The reason they do it is that quite often the fastest part of the day’s ride comes right at the beginning and they need to be ready to go ‘full gas’ from the off.
What even the keenest Tour riders most definitely don’t do, however, is pedal on the spot for five long hours before finally moving that first competitive millimetre. This is basically what England did today.
Are you sitting comfortably?
As a fielding side, opening partnerships are the worst, and first innings opening partnerships are the very worst of the worst. This is because until you take that first wicket, you haven’t actually meaningfully got going in the game.
Tom Latham and Devon Conway got going. They didn’t set off at a sprint or anything, but they began moving immediately. They then quickly settled on a pace they felt they could maintain.
Devon Conway in particular isn’t a man who takes good form for granted. The best batters can get complacent and overly ambitious, but when you’re on such intimate terms with awkward scratchiness, you take those good days in a boa constrictor embrace and ensure you make full use of them.
So New Zealand started well and they kept on moving. In contrast, England didn’t roll out of the neutral zone until their opponents were already 317 runs into their day.
This wasn’t just allowing the opposition a head start. It wasn’t merely doing nothing and falling a long way behind. It was far worse than that. It was working hard to go nowhere. It was five hours of effort to get exactly where you were five hours ago, resolutely joe-rooted to the spot.
It’s an interesting measure of a team to see what they do in a situation like that and 4-44 from a weary, standing start represents quite a surge.
No-one really talks about how Ben Stokes makes things happen these days. It must have become such a big and obvious cliché that even cricket can’t bear to maintain it any more. Making the breakthrough was making things happen though – albeit only after making that gargantuan head start exist first via his captaincy over the preceding hours.
What did we learn about anyone else? The three other wickets were shared between three other bowlers – if you can call Joe Root a bowler – which means it’s hard to pick out some standout hard-head who refused to buckle to circumstance.
The great thing with chief exec pitches though is that there’s always likely to be another day of toil from which to explore the players’ characters and draw your conclusions. Warm up for day two.