When New Zealand last played at Trent Bridge, Tim Southee was in their team and Luke Ronchi in their dressing room. They batted first, scored 318 for four on the first day, 553 in their first innings, and lost. Four years on, with eight members of the 2022 side still in their squad, they finished the opening day on 361 for four but may have an old, bad memory impinging on their jubilation.
“There’ll probably be a few guys in the New Zealand changing room with that in the back of their minds. It’s always there in the memory bank,” said Southee, now England’s bowling coach. “In reality it’s a very different team compared to 2022, it’s different cricket, it’s a different surface,” said Ronchi, still the Kiwis’ batting coach. “That hasn’t really come into it.”
The four wickets to fall all came in the last 12 overs of the day, after New Zealand had reached 317 without loss. Rachin Ravindra and Henry Nicholls fell to the last two deliveries before stumps. “It’s a fantastic score, but there’s just that clinical nature of how you’d really like to finish off the day. If you want to be really picky, you look at those sorts of things,” Ronchi said.
“But it’s a better position than we’ve been at in other matches of this series. If you’re given that score at the start of the day, there wouldn’t be a single person that will say: ‘No, we want more than that.’”
In his five previous innings on this tour, the first two of them in Ireland, Devon Conway had scored 66 runs, averaged 13.20, and definitely did want more than that. He had also spent lots of time with his thoughts, while flying home for the birth of his second child between the first two Tests. “I felt a little out of sorts at times,” he said.
“I’ve been struggling with my pre-movement. I was trying out keeping my back foot still, as I was getting it in too late.” Conway tried his modified, practically eliminated trigger movement on Thursday. He did not like it. After three balls he reverted to his old method and scored 157.
“He was just trying a few little things to work out his prelim and how it might work and how it might feel,” Ronchi said. “For the first few balls he was trying one thing and then I think he changed to another thing.
“It’s just working on timings of how he wants to be set before a bowler lets go of the ball, just coming down to trusting how it goes and the timing of when he should be doing it. Today it worked out really well. You can really see a difference, and it makes it just that little bit easier to face blokes.”
