🔗 Share this article

England's training sessions for a warm, arid T20 World Cup in India in the coming month brought them on Wednesday to a chilly, rainy New Zealand's largest city, where they were forced to conduct the final training session before their third game against New Zealand inside. It is not always obvious what role these two-team contests fulfill, what useful lessons could possibly be gained – but on this occasion, for at least one of the players, that is not an issue.

The Batter's New Role: From Opener to Lower Down

Tom Banton 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 situation it is certainly accurate. After forging his reputation as a top-order batter, mostly as an opener, Banton suddenly finds himself a totally new position, coming in at five or six. “There weren’t really too many conversations,” he said. “They simply brought me back into the squad and told, ‘Your role will be in the lower batting lineup now.’”

Before his recall in the summer, 87% of Banton’s over 160 professional T20 appearances had been as an starting batsman, another 8% at third position and the remaining handful – but for a brief stint at seventh spot in a T20 Blast game eight years ago – at No 4. If the team intend to retain him in this new position he requires every possible opportunity to become accustomed to it, and he has already worked out one thing: “Playing down the order,” he concluded, “is a lot harder than opening.”

Mixed Results in New Zealand

Banton said that “there’s going to be times where it works well and it looks great and other times where it doesn’t”, and the initial matches of the tour in the host nation have seen one of each. In the first, he faced a few deliveries and made nine runs before holing out to long-on; in the next game, he played 12 deliveries, scored 29, and ended the innings unbeaten.

Reflections on Return and Development

The current series has seen Banton return to the nation in which he made his international debut in November 2019. Since then, he moved away of the team, had a short comeback in 2022 and then spent more than three years in the wilderness before coming back for the new captain's first T20 as skipper. “On the flight over, it was strange,” he said. “Time has passed when I made my debut. Seems a lot has happened in that time. I've discovered a lot about myself. The few years after I got dropped from England was a tough time for me. I had a couple of years stretch where I was working myself out.”

Backing from Team Management

Currently, he has been given something new to tackle. Banton is thankful to have been given another chance, and also for the coach's skill to put him at ease while he works out how best to grasp it. “Baz approached me before [the recent game] and said, ‘Head out and express yourself.’ It's reassuring to have that freedom,” Banton said. “I realize it’s just a brief comment someone says, but it gives me the backing that if it doesn't work, it’s not a disaster. It is so minor but for me it’s, ‘OK, I’ve got the backing from the head coach and I can go out and do it.’”

Venue Change and Squad Decisions

Following the first two games of the series at the South Island ground, a stadium with unusually long boundaries, England finish the series on the next day at the Auckland arena, a dual-purpose sports facility where the field edge at 55m is among the shortest in the sport. With uncertain weather and an new location they have dropped their recent habit of revealing their lineup two days in advance while they work out if their preferred team here will be the same as the one that began both previous games.

Upcoming Changes for One-Day Matches

Next, they travel to the coastal town and shift attention to one-day internationals, with a slightly amended team: three players are omitted, while four others come in. Three of those players landed in the city on the same day but the scheduling of the bowler's Test match buildup implies he will arrive two days later, flying 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. Consequently he will be absent for the first match at Bay Oval, the ground where he was racially abused on his only previous appearance, in a few years back.