🔗 Share this article

The English side's preparations for a hot, dry T20 World Cup in India in the coming month brought them on Wednesday to a cool, drizzly New Zealand's largest city, where they were compelled to hold the last training session ahead of their next match against the Kiwis indoors. It is not always obvious what role these two-team contests fulfill, what valuable insights could possibly be gained – but on this occasion, for at least one of the players, that is no concern.

Tom Banton's Changed Position: Starting Batsman to Lower Down

The cricketer says he is “continuing to develop”, and if it is the kind of line often repeated even by players who have long since scaled the peak of their game, in his case it is undeniably true. After building his name as a frontline hitter, mostly as an starting player, Banton suddenly finds himself a completely unfamiliar role, coming in at the middle order. “There weren’t really too many discussions,” he said. “I just got brought me back into the team and informed me, ‘You’re going to bat in the middle order now.’”

Prior to returning in June, 87% of Banton’s 162 professional T20 appearances had been as an starting batsman, another 8% at No3 and the rest – but for seven balls at seventh spot in a domestic T20 game previously – at fourth place. If England plan to retain him in this new position he needs every chance to become accustomed to it, and he has already worked out one thing: “Batting in the middle order,” he concluded, “is a much tougher than starting the innings.”

Mixed Results in the Tour

The player noted that “there’s going to be times where it comes off and it appears brilliant and on other occasions where it doesn’t”, and the first two games of the tour in the host nation have seen one of each. In the first, he faced nine balls and made nine runs before holing out to the deep fielder; in the next game, he played 12 deliveries, hit runs, and ended the innings not out.

Reflections on Return and Growth

This tour has witnessed Banton come back to the nation in which he made his international debut in November 2019. Since then, he drifted back out of the side, had a short comeback in 2022 and then passed a long period in the sidelines before coming back for the new captain's initial match as skipper. “During the journey, it was strange,” he said. “It was six years ago when I started internationally. Seems a lot has happened in that time. I've discovered a lot about myself. The few years after I got dropped from the national team was a difficult phase for me. I had a two- to three-year period where I was working myself out.”

Support from Team Management

Currently, he has been assigned a fresh challenge to work out. Banton is thankful to have been offered a return, and also for the coach's ability to put him at ease while he works out how best to grasp it. “The coach came up to me before [the recent game] and said, ‘Head out and play your natural game.’ It’s nice to have that freedom,” Banton said. “I know it’s just a brief comment from the staff, but it provides the backing that if it doesn’t come off, it’s not a disaster. It’s something so small but for me it’s, ‘Alright, I’ve got the backing from the manager and I can step up and perform.’”

Shift in Location and Squad Decisions

After playing the initial matches of the series at Christchurch’s Hagley Park, a stadium with unusually long boundaries, the visitors finish the series on Thursday at Eden Park, a multi-use sports facility where the field edge at 55m is among the most compact in the sport. With changeable conditions and an unfamiliar venue they have abandoned their usual practice of announcing their lineup two days in advance while they determine if their ideal XI here will be the same as the side that began the earlier fixtures.

Upcoming Changes for ODI Series

On Friday, they travel to the coastal town and turn focus to one-day internationals, with a somewhat changed squad: Jordan Cox, Zak Crawley and Phil Salt are omitted, while four others join the squad. Most newcomers arrived in Auckland on Wednesday but the timing of Archer’s Test match buildup implies he will arrive two days later, flying with two fellow bowlers, fast bowlers who are also building towards the Tests in Australia but are not in the limited-overs team. Consequently Archer will miss the opening game at Bay Oval, the stadium where he was subjected to abuse on his sole prior visit, in a few years back.