Latham seeks riches on the Tour of Unequals

Midweek Book Club features a glorious salt-splashed and sunburnt piece of work, and; Is it really OK to laugh at a football giant lighting fire to £600m?

Photosport/ Andrew Cornaga

When your nine of your best white-ball players are at the Indian Premier League and another three accomplished T20 operators - Colin de Grandhomme, Colin Munro and Martin Guptill - are filling their boots outside the New Zealand Cricket contract system, it was probably pushing things to expect too much from this current tour to Pakistan; a tour Cricinfo touted as the clash of the unequals.

Against all logic, here New Zealand are. Even though it’s now mid-April, and the time of year when it becomes uncomfortably hot has just about commenced. Never mind, indeed, that it’s Ramzan, pushing the start of the T20Is to 9pm local time, meaning they won’t finish before midnight. Or that the series will straddle Eid, meaning Pakistan will be playing cricket while the rest of the country celebrates the end of Ramzan. And never mind that most of New Zealand’s finest players are currently across the other side of the Attari-Wagah border…

Pakistan, by contrast, could not be better placed.

If we’re being brutal about the whole exercise, it’s a tour nobody except the host administration actually wants and even then you suspect that’s just to provide their broadcast partner with some content churn.  

Still, the series is alive going into the fourth T20I in Rawalpindi overnight, and there are a few points of interest, particularly around Tom Latham’s return to T20Is and whether he might have a future in the format.

It’s one of those 21st-century cricket conundrums where he doesn’t feel like an easy fit in the shortest format and yet who can blame him for trying when it’s the quickest route to big money.