NOTES FROM THE OVAL #1

A few quick singles as NZ almost lose their way on a day of self-inflicted damage

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NZ 319 for 8 (Williamson 93, Latham 47, Phillips 41*; Bashir 4-69)

As the giant phallic symbol perched on a golf cart entered Hagley Oval to signal the first drinks break with the hosts 58 for 1, it felt perfectly natural to utter that most cricketing of clichés: “Good toss to lose.”

By the end of the day, that sentiment had changed into a hard-to-answer question: “Did New Zealand just waste a giant opportunity to take control of this test?”

To reach straight back into the kitbag of clichés, we might have to wait until both teams have batted on this wicket that provided a strange sort of spongy bounce throughout day one.

The wicket was green, of course it was, but as this early aerial screen-grab indicates, the playing strip was quite distinct from the rest of the wicket block at least, which is not always the case on the first morning in Christchurch.

Screen grab from TVNZ coverage.

After Devon Conway’s curious dismissal, Kane Williamson looked happily anchored, while Tom Latham was up on his foils. Breezy is not a word you’d often associate with the southpaw, but he had something in his sails as he skimmed through to 47 off just 54 deliveries. He loves this ground, coming into the match with close to 1100 runs at Hagley, many more than the next-best Williamson, who brought 764 runs worth of experience to this surface.

The partnership reflected that discrepancy. As it passed 50, Williamson was on 7. Latham had run through his greatest hits — a glance off his hip, a cut, a series of lovely checked drives in an arc from backward point to mid-off and, eventually, the flicks through midwicket.

This latter shot is when Latham is at his most fluent and his most vulnerable. So it proved again, with the skipper aiming to work Brydon Carse through midwicket when it required the maker’s name to be aiming back past the bowler. It was a good ball, and we always have to remind ourselves that international bowlers are allowed to bowl them, but if you were looking at it through a Latham-centric prism, he had wasted a nice tailwind.

For Latham, that fourth slip to wide mid-on bat plane is a problem, for his opening partner Conway it is bat face. He is so closed-off to right-armers coming around the wicket that his inside edge is always in play. This dismissal wasn’t a conventional inside-edge bat-pad or chop-on, but a one-handed checked drive that skewed off the inner half of the bat for a Gus Atkinson caught and bowled. The catch was nifty, the shot was pretty damn ugly.

***

The Conway-Latham opening partnership has been a basket case going back to the post-World Cup series in Bangladesh. They’ve opened together 19 times since then and averaged 17.95 for the first wicket. In that time they compiled more zero partnerships (3) than they have plus-50 (2). Yet for all that futility, neither present an open-and-shut case for being moved or, in Conway’s case, removed.

They’re neither completely in form or out, but instead are existing in a batting purgatory where they’re a big score from being back and a failure or two from being cracked.

Neither have scored a test ton since they last holidayed in Karachi. That’s 27 completed innings for Conway and 32 for Latham. To put some context around those numbers, at the height of the Henry Nicholls talkback-angst, he went 15 innings without hitting three figures (albeit from the relative comfort of No 5).

Yet it’s unlikely there will be agitation for change. Both played critical innings in bowling conditions in India and Latham looked fantastic today, just not for long enough. There are no openers queuing up and the next cab off the rank, Will Young, has demonstrated even greater fragility against the new ball.

As it stands, New Zealand will continue to live with 18 for 1 as long as both continue to chip in occasionally and, silver linings and all that, it doesn’t keep your best player out of the game for long.