🔗 Share this article

England's training sessions for a warm, arid T20 World Cup in the subcontinent in the coming month led them on midweek to a cool, drizzly Auckland, where they were forced to hold the last training session before their next match against New Zealand indoors. The purpose isn't always clear what purpose these two-team contests fulfill, what valuable insights could possibly be learned – but on this instance, for at least one of the players, that is no concern.

Tom Banton's New Role: Starting Batsman to Lower Down

The cricketer says he is “still learning now”, and if it is the type of statement often repeated even by athletes who have long since scaled the pinnacle of their sport, in his situation it is certainly accurate. After building his name as a frontline hitter, mostly as an opener, Banton now occupies a completely unfamiliar position, batting at five or six. “There weren’t really too many conversations,” he said. “I just got brought me back into the team and informed me, ‘You’re going to bat in the middle order now.’”

Before his recall in the summer, the vast majority of Banton’s over 160 professional T20 appearances had been as an opener, another 8% at No3 and the remaining handful – but for a brief stint at No 7 in a domestic T20 game previously – at fourth place. If the team plan to retain him in this new position he requires every chance to become accustomed to it, and he has figured 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 appears brilliant and other times where it fails”, and the initial matches of the winter in New Zealand have seen both outcomes. In the first, he lasted a few deliveries and made a low score before holing out to long-on; in the second, he faced 12 deliveries, hit runs, and ended the innings unbeaten.

Reflections on Return and Growth

This tour has witnessed Banton return 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 recently and then passed more than three years in the wilderness before coming back for Harry Brook’s first T20 as skipper. “During the journey, it was weird,” he said. “Time has passed when I started internationally. Seems a lot has happened in that period. I've discovered a lot about myself. The period after I got dropped from the national team was a tough time for me. I had a two- to three-year stretch where I was working myself out.”

Backing from Coaching Staff

And now, he has been assigned something new to tackle. Banton is grateful to have been offered a return, and also for the coach's ability to make him comfortable while he figures out how best to grasp it. “The coach approached me before [the recent game] and said, ‘Head out and express yourself.’ It’s nice to have that liberty,” Banton said. “I realize it’s just a brief comment from the staff, but it gives me the backing that if it doesn't work, it’s not a disaster. It is so small but for me it’s, ‘Alright, I’ve got the approval from the manager and I can go out and do it.’”

Shift in Location and Squad Decisions

Following the initial matches of the contest at Christchurch’s Hagley Park, a stadium with unusually long boundaries, the visitors finish the series on Thursday at the Auckland arena, a dual-purpose sports facility where the straight boundary at 55m is among the most compact in the sport. With changeable conditions and an new location they have abandoned their recent habit of announcing their team ahead of time while they determine if their ideal XI for this match will be the same as the side that started the earlier fixtures.

Squad Adjustments for ODI Series

On Friday, they travel to the coastal town and turn focus to one-day internationals, with a slightly amended team: 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 the city on Wednesday but the scheduling of the bowler's Test match buildup implies he will follow two days later, travelling with two fellow bowlers, fast bowlers who are also preparing for the Tests in Australia but are not in the limited-overs team. Consequently he will be absent for the opening game at Bay Oval, the stadium where he was racially abused on his sole prior visit, in a few years back.