It was on the morning of the second day of the previous Test that England in effect surrendered it, and it might just be that on the morning of the second day of this one they turned it in their favour. A different captain, a transformed team, a complete contrast in intensity and outcome – but for all that, it still started amid echoes of a familiar and really quite irritating tune.
For a while the players’ memories must have drifted back to those two ragged hours at the Oval, during which New Zealand added more than 100 runs for their last three first-innings wickets, the short ball ploy was miserably overused, Glenn Phillips and Kyle Jamieson enjoyed the experience a lot more than England’s bowlers, and an air of haplessness and despond settled over an inexperienced side that would never shake it off.
It took 12 overs and three balls for England to make a breakthrough on that day, and here 10 and two. And what must have really smarted, as they toiled and sweated and once again, if not for so long or so expensively, hammered the ball into the deck, was the extended presence at the crease of Will O’Rourke, a nightwatcher whose track record did not exactly make such a thing feel at all likely.
O’Rourke’s wasn’t the classic nightwatcher innings. For a start, he didn’t even face a ball on the night he was supposed to be watching, coming in after Rachin Ravindra’s dismissal, watching Henry Nicholls edge the very next delivery, and going off again. It was the fourth time he had been deployed in the role: twice he was dismissed before stumps without scoring, and twice now he has made it to stumps without scoring.
Not scoring has very much been the theme of O’Rourke’s first-class career. This was his highest red-ball score and the 20th time he has managed to get at least one, but there have still been 21 innings when he has not. Fully 65.2% of his previous Test innings had ended without him getting off the mark. Yet he can be stubborn: a 20-ball zero against South Africa in 2024, and heroic 30- and 39-ball knocks against England later that same year, both of which he ended unbeaten on five.
This, though, this was something else. In his 24th Test innings, O’Rourke would score precisely as many runs as in all the previous 23 put together, in the process bumping his all-time boundary count from one to five. And if one of those was an edge and another was a complete accident when he was trying quite hard not to touch the ball at all, there was also a drive past point off Jofra Archer that can take pride of place in his brief highlights reel. All the while he outscored the proper batter at the other end: when Daryl Mitchell was dismissed he had faced 33 balls and scored 11, while O’Rourke had 19 off 30.
For England, every minute was an aggravation. At least those bouncers were not punished: where Phillips and Jamieson tucked in, O’Rourke and Mitchell ducked out. The eight overs from Archer and Josh Tongue that started the day might not have brought wickets but they were fast, hostile – the bowlers hoping perhaps to hear the sweet sound of leather on Will O’(Rourke) – and cost just 15 runs. This period of England’s time in the field on the second day was BS – that’s Before Stokes, for it was the England captain’s arrival into the attack that would change everything.
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The conversion of New Zealand’s overnight score of 361 for four into 438 all out was an effort of three precise thirds, or at least one-third that was very different from the other two. The first 10.1 was a tale of rising frustration, reaching a pinnacle when Stokes, in his first over of the day, found O’Rourke’s edge but, somehow, not Jamie Smith’s glove.
The remaining 20.2 was marked by rising jubilation, sparked first by the dismissal of Mitchell and then that of O’Rourke, a proper tail-ender’s ending: big swing, top edge, easy catch. Thus before long he was back, ball in hand, and with only his fifth delivery getting his revenge on Emilio Gay for taking that catch. A more familiar, more comfortable role, but if a cricket bat can look odd beside his 6ft 4in frame, it isn’t normally there for long.
