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England's training sessions for a warm, arid T20 World Cup in India in the coming month led them on Wednesday to a cool, drizzly New Zealand's largest city, where they were compelled to hold the final training session before their third game against the Kiwis indoors. It is not always obvious what role these two-team contests serve, what valuable insights could possibly be learned – but on this instance, for at least one of the players, that is not an issue.

The Batter's New Role: Starting Batsman to Lower Down

Tom Banton 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 certainly accurate. After building his name as a frontline hitter, mostly as an starting player, Banton suddenly finds himself a completely unfamiliar position, batting at the middle order. “There weren’t really too many conversations,” he said. “They simply brought me back into the squad and told, ‘You’re going to bat in the middle order now.’”

Before his recall in June, the vast majority of Banton’s 162 senior T20 innings had been as an opener, another 8% at No3 and the rest – but for seven balls at seventh spot in a T20 Blast game previously – at No 4. If the team plan to retain him in this new position he requires every possible opportunity to become accustomed to it, and he has figured out one thing: “Playing down the order,” he surmised, “is a lot harder than opening.”

Mixed Results in New Zealand

Banton said that “sometimes where it works well and it looks great and other times where it fails”, and the initial matches of the tour in New Zealand have featured both outcomes. In the first, he faced nine balls and scored nine runs before holing out to long-on; in the next game, he played 12 deliveries, hit runs, and ended the innings unbeaten.

Thoughts on Return and Growth

The current series has witnessed Banton return to the country in which he made his international debut in November 2019. After that, he moved away of the team, had a short comeback in 2022 and then passed a long period in the sidelines before returning for the new captain's initial match as skipper. “During the journey, it was weird,” he said. “Time has passed when I started internationally. Seems a lot has happened in that time. I've discovered a lot about myself. The period after I was left out from the national team was a difficult phase for me. I had a couple of years period where I was working myself out.”

Support from Team Management

Currently, he has been assigned something new to work out. Banton is grateful to have been offered a return, and also for the coach's ability to make him comfortable while he works out how best to grasp it. “Baz came up to me before [Monday’s second T20] and said, ‘Go out and express yourself.’ It’s nice to have that liberty,” Banton said. “I know it’s just a brief comment someone says, but it gives me the support that if it doesn’t come off, it’s not a disaster. It’s something so small but for me it’s, ‘Alright, I’ve got the approval from the head coach and I can go out and perform.’”

Venue Change and Team Selection

After playing the first two games of the contest at the South Island ground, a stadium with unusually long boundaries, the visitors complete it on Thursday at the Auckland arena, a dual-purpose sports facility where the field edge at 55m is among the shortest in the world. With changeable conditions and an new location they have dropped their usual practice of announcing their lineup ahead of time while they work out if their ideal XI here will be the identical as the side that began both previous games.

Upcoming Changes for One-Day Matches

Next, they travel to Mount Maunganui and shift attention to ODIs, with a somewhat changed squad: Jordan Cox, Zak Crawley and Phil Salt are omitted, while four others come in. Three of those players arrived in Auckland on the same day but the scheduling of Archer’s Test match buildup implies he will follow later, travelling with two fellow bowlers, two seamers who are also preparing for the longer format in the away series but are not in the white-ball squad. Consequently Archer will miss the opening game at Bay Oval, the ground where he was racially abused on his sole prior visit, in a few years back.