Brendon McCullum has said that he believed the second Test crowd at the Oval were about to fall in love with Sonny Baker, and England’s head coach was right. The 23-year-old debutant, who is playing only his 14th first-class game, lit up an intriguing first day’s play.
New Zealand finished on 291 for seven, and Baker had the pick of the wickets. He had Rachin Ravindra caught in the gully for 33 and Daryl Mitchell caught at midwicket for 44 to finish with figures of two for 63. He got a huge roar of appreciation when he walked to the boundary after both dismissals.
“How do you think I enjoyed it?” Baker said. “It was brilliant. Awesome.” He had been too nervous to eat the night before the game. “Even this morning I could feel the anxiety build up in my stomach, I was trying to play cards on the bus to try and take my mind off the gravity of the situation.
And then the cap presentation was probably more emotional than anything. I was trying not to get emotional from the rest of the lads, but I was struggling a little bit to be honest.”
Baker had already played two limited-overs matches for England but had not taken a wicket in either of them. “I think probably my biggest lesson was that I need to be myself,” he said. “I was a little bit boring in those matches, I’d watch the ball go through to the keeper and think: ‘Thank goodness there hasn’t been a boundary,’ and I’ve never been about scurrying off back to the mark, I’m the biggest carry-on ever. So surely I should just get stuck in? I made a commitment to myself to be authentic coming into this.”
The bowler was full of praise for the team’s hierarchy. “The relaxed nature of the environment really, really, really helps from a nerves point of view,” he said. “Everything that’s gone on hasn’t been too bad in terms of the impact on us. I think it’s been relatively negligible, to be honest.
I felt pretty calm and, you know, let’s just get stuck in. Everyone is talking about the positives, the opportunities: ‘Let’s get excited, let’s go for it,’ because there’s no point letting all that other stuff influence us.”
