The English side's training sessions for a hot, dry T20 World Cup in India in the coming month brought them on midweek to a cool, drizzly Auckland, where they were forced to conduct the final training session ahead of their third game against the Kiwis indoors. It is not always obvious what purpose these two-team contests serve, what useful lessons could possibly be gained – but on this instance, for at least one of the players, that is no concern.
The cricketer says he is “still learning now”, and if it is the kind of line often repeated even by athletes who have already reached the peak of their sport, in his situation it is undeniably true. After building his name as a frontline hitter, mostly as an opener, Banton suddenly finds himself a totally new position, coming in at the middle order. “I didn't have too many conversations,” he said. “They simply brought me back into the team and told, ‘Your role will be in the middle order now.’”
Prior to returning in the summer, 87% of Banton’s over 160 senior T20 innings had been as an opener, a further portion at third position and the remaining handful – but for a brief stint at seventh spot in a domestic T20 game previously – at No 4. If the team plan to keep him in this new position he requires every chance to get used to it, and he has figured out a key point: “Playing down the order,” he surmised, “is a much tougher than opening.”
The player noted that “there’s going to be times where it works well and it appears brilliant and on other occasions where it doesn’t”, and the initial matches of the winter in the host nation have featured one of each. In the first, he faced a few deliveries and made a low score before holing out to the deep fielder; in the second, he faced a dozen balls, scored 29, and ended the innings not out.
This tour has witnessed Banton come back to the country in which he first played for his country in November 2019. After that, he drifted back out of the team, made a brief return in recently and then spent more than three years in the wilderness before returning for Harry Brook’s initial match as England captain. “On the flight over, it was strange,” he said. “It was six years ago when I made my debut. Seems a lot has happened in that period. I’ve learned a lot about me. The period after I got dropped from England was a difficult phase for me. I had a two- to three-year stretch where I was working myself out.”
And now, he has been assigned a fresh challenge to work out. Banton is thankful to have been given another chance, and also for Brendon McCullum’s skill to put him at ease while he figures out how best to seize the opportunity. “The coach approached me before [the recent game] and said, ‘Head out and play your natural game.’ It's reassuring to have that liberty,” Banton said. “I know it’s only a small thing someone says, but it provides the backing that if it doesn't work, it’s not the end of the world. It is so small but for me it’s, ‘OK, I’ve got the backing from the manager and I can step up and do it.’”
After playing the initial matches of the contest at Christchurch’s Hagley Park, a venue with unusually long boundaries, England finish the series on the next day at Eden Park, a multi-use rugby and cricket ground where the field edge at a short distance is among the most compact in the sport. With changeable conditions and an new location they have abandoned their recent habit of announcing their lineup ahead of time while they work out if their preferred team for this match will be the same as the one that started the earlier fixtures.
On Friday, they move to Mount Maunganui and shift attention to ODIs, with a somewhat changed team: three players are omitted, while Jofra Archer, Ben Duckett, Joe Root and Jamie Smith come in. Three of those players landed in Auckland on Wednesday but the scheduling of the bowler's Test match buildup means he will arrive 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. As a result Archer will be absent for the opening game at Bay Oval, the stadium where he was racially abused on his sole prior visit, in 2019.
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