Key events
26th over: New Zealand 87-6 (Conway 27, Phillips 18) Phillips, not bothering to move his feet, clubs a length ball from Robinson past mid-off. He adds a single, so does the newly liberated Conway, and this partnership has raced to 29, which makes it the equal highest of the innings. Jamie Smith retreats to stand next to the slips, as if to concede that New Zealand have seized the initiative. Phillips celebrates with another crunching drive. This is more like it!
25th over: New Zealand 77-6 (Conway 26, Phillips 9) Conway, facing Tongue, decides that he may as well come to the party. First he steers a four to gully’s right, then he tries to leave a lifter, reacts too late, pats it to Harry Brook at second slip – and is dropped as Brook can only tip it over the bar.
24th over: New Zealand 71-6 (Conway 20, Phillips 9) Robinson continues, moving the ball both ways. Phillips finds the boundary in no time – but only off the inside edge. And again, with his first shot of some authority, punched past cover. “You need to be playing Twenty20 here,” says Stuart Broad, and Phillips, unlike the rest of the Kiwis, seems to agree. He’s been there five minutes and has already made more runs than Latham, O’Rourke, Ravindra and Mitchell put together.
23rd over: New Zealand 63-6 (Conway 20, Phillips 1) Glenn Phillips, so unfazed in the first innings, starts purposefully again with a clip for a single. But he’s coming in very low in the order… Conway needs to stay with him.
Josh Tongue spoke to Sky this morning and revealed one of the secrets of his success: at his mark, he has a smiley face, “in case I get a bit down”. Not that he’s needed in this match.
WICKET! Blundell LBW b Tongue 4 (New Zealand 58-6)
Here we go! Tongue nips one back down the slope, Blundell is pinned on the crease and although he discusses it with Conway, he doesn’t bother to review.
22nd over: New Zealand 55-5 (Conway 19, Blundell 2) Robinson is on the spot but Tom Blundell keeps the first three balls out easily enough, even with Jamie Smith breathing down his neck.
The players are out there. And the ball is in the hands of Ollie Robinson, who has an over to finish.
The first email of the day comes from John Starbuck. “Good morning. In the Preamble you aver that England’s three main seamers will get the job done.” I’m not a betting man, but I’d like to know what the odds may be on Shoaib Bashir getting an over or two?”
Good question! Almost as long as the odds on an email including the word “aver”.
By the way, if you make the minimum 50 wickets rather than 80, Robinson is no longer the best in the last 100 years. He’s not even the best in this England dressing-room: it’s Gus Atkinson, with Josh Tongue just behind him. And, rather more surprisingly, Brydon Carse is in the top four.
What about Jimmy Anderson, or Ian Botham? Not even in the top 20. Full list here.
On Sky, Mike Atherton has been chairing a chat about the papers. With actual printed copies! Good to see that they still have a role to play.
Atherton homed in on a great finding in the Sunday Times. Ollie Robinson is now England’s best bowler, by Test strike rate, since the first world war (min. 80 wickets). Robinson has a wicket every 47 balls, two fewer than the late, great Fred Trueman. If only Fred were here now, on the radio, to tell us how much harder it was in his day and he just doesn’t know what’s going off on Stats Guru.
Preamble
Morning everyone and welcome to a Test that has somehow dribbled into a fourth day. We’ve had a wicket roughly every four overs, but the rain gods have allowed only five sessions’ play. England are well on top, yet they could still lose.
They need to take five more wickets before New Zealand score 199 more runs. So far, between the showers, the New Zealanders have managed only 168 for 15 wickets, so 199 for four may sound like a stretch. But there’s more batting left than you might think because they sent in a nightwatchman, way back on Friday evening.
They’ve got an opener, Devon Conway, who’s still there and who made 200 on his Test debut at Lord’s. He may have added only 23, 3, 13, 1 and 19* at this address since, but that could mean that he’s overdue another big one. And the two men who bashed most of the runs in NZ’s first innings, Glenn Phillips and Kyle Jamieson, are still to come. It’s as if their captain, Tom Latham, has done by accident what Don Bradman once did deliberately and got the batting order the wrong way up.
On a pitch that has been dry, uneven and widely derided, England’s bowlers have only had to look at the off bail to be lethal. Ollie Robinson, when he switched to the Nursery End yesterday and Jamie Smith stood up to the stumps, promptly took two wickets in four balls. He has seven for 57 in the match, Gus Atkinson four for 25, Josh Tongue four for 55. Only Ben Stokes (none for 22) has been firing blanks.
Robinson has never taken eight wickets in a Test, let alone ten, so he will still be hungry today, and the chances are that he, Atkinson and Tongue will finish the job. But a low-scoring match can be won by one fearless knock, as England found in the last first Test they played, at Perth, when Travis Head beat them at their own game. So you never know.
Play resumes at 11am BST and the forecast, thankfully, is as dry as the pitch.
