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England’s preparations for a hot, dry T20 World Cup in India in February brought them on Wednesday to a cool, drizzly Auckland, where they were forced to conduct the final training session ahead of their third game against New Zealand indoors. It is not always obvious what purpose these bilateral series serve, what useful lessons could possibly be being learned – but on this occasion, for at least one of the players, that is not an issue.
Tom Banton says he is “still learning now”, and if it is the kind of line regularly trotted out even by players who have long since scaled the pinnacle of their sport in his case it is undeniably true. After forging his reputation as a top-order batter, mostly as an opener, Banton suddenly finds himself in a completely unfamiliar role, coming in at five or six. “There weren’t really too many conversations,” he said. “I just got brought back into the team and told, ‘You’re going to bat in the middle order now.’”
Before his recall in June 87% of Banton’s 162 senior T20 innings had been as an opener, another 8% at No3 and the remaining handful – but for seven balls at No 7 in a T20 Blast game eight years ago – at No 4. If England intend to keep him in this new position he needs every possible opportunity to become accustomed to it, and he has already worked out one thing: “Batting in the middle order,” he surmised, “is a lot harder than opening.”
Banton said that “there’s going to be times where it comes off and it looks great and other times where it doesn’t”, and the first two games of the winter in New Zealand have seen one of each. In the first he lasted nine balls and scored nine runs before holing out to long-on; in the second he faced 12 deliveries, scored 29, and ended the innings unbeaten.
This tour has seen Banton return to the country in which he made his international debut in November 2019. Since then he drifted back out of the side, made a brief return in 2022 and then spent more than three years in the wilderness before coming back for Harry Brook’s first T20 as England captain. “On the flight over, it was weird,” he said. “It was six years ago now when I made my debut. It feels like a lot has happened in that time. I’ve learned a lot about myself. The few years after I got dropped from England was a tough time for me. I had a two- to three-year period where I was working myself out.”
And now he has been given something new to work out. Banton is grateful to have been given another chance, and also for Brendon McCullum’s ability to put him at ease while he works out how best to grasp it. “Baz came up to me before [Monday’s second T20] and said, ‘Go out and express yourself.’ It’s nice to have that freedom,” Banton said. “I know it’s only a small thing someone says, but it gives me the backing that if it doesn’t come off, it’s not the end of the world. It’s something so small but for me it’s, ‘OK, I’ve got the backing from the head coach and I can go out and do it.’”
After playing the first two games of the series at Christchurch’s Hagley Park, a ground with unusually long boundaries, England complete it on Thursday at Eden Park, a dual-purpose rugby and cricket ground where the straight boundary at 55m is among the shortest in the world. With uncertain weather and an unfamiliar venue they have abandoned their recent habit of announcing their team two days in advance while they work out if their ideal XI here will be the same as the one that started both previous games.
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On Friday they move to Mount Maunganui and shift attention to ODIs, with a slightly amended squad: Jordan Cox, Zak Crawley and Phil Salt drop out, while Jofra Archer, Ben Duckett, Joe Root and Jamie Smith come in. Three of those players arrived in Auckland on Wednesday but the scheduling of Archer’s Ashes preparations means he will follow two days later, travelling with Mark Wood and Josh Tongue, two seamers who are also building towards the Tests in Australia but are not in the white-ball squad. As a result Archer will miss the opening game at Bay Oval, the ground where he was racially abused on his only previous appearance, in 2019.
