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The English side's preparations for a warm, arid T20 World Cup in India in February led them on Wednesday to a cool, drizzly New Zealand's largest city, where they were forced to conduct the final practice run before their third game against the Kiwis inside. It is not always obvious what purpose these bilateral series serve, what valuable insights could possibly be learned – but on this instance, for at least one of the players, that is no concern.

Tom Banton's New Role: Starting Batsman to Middle Order

Tom Banton says he is “still learning now”, and if it is the kind of line regularly trotted out even by athletes who have long since scaled the peak of their game, in his situation it is undeniably true. After forging his reputation as a frontline hitter, primarily as an starting player, Banton suddenly finds himself a completely unfamiliar role, coming in at five or six. “I didn't have too many conversations,” he said. “They simply brought me back into the team and informed me, ‘Your role will be in the middle order now.’”

Prior to returning in June, 87% of Banton’s over 160 senior T20 innings had been as an opener, a further portion at No3 and the remaining handful – but for seven balls at No 7 in a T20 Blast game eight years ago – at No 4. If England plan to keep him in this new position he needs every possible opportunity to become accustomed to it, and he has already worked out one thing: “Batting in the middle order,” he surmised, “is a lot harder than opening.”

Mixed Results in New Zealand

Banton said that “there’s going to be times where it comes off and it appears brilliant and on other occasions where it fails”, and the first two games of the winter in New Zealand have seen one of each. In the first, he faced nine balls and made nine runs before getting out to the deep fielder; in the second, he faced 12 deliveries, hit runs, and ended the innings unbeaten.

Reflections on Comeback and Development

This tour has witnessed Banton come back to the nation in which he first played for his country in late 2019. After that, he drifted back out of the team, had a short comeback in 2022 and then spent more than three years in the sidelines before coming back for Harry Brook’s initial match as skipper. “On the flight over, it was strange,” he said. “It was six years ago when I started internationally. Seems a lot has happened in that time. I've discovered a lot about myself. The few years after I got dropped from England was a difficult phase for me. I had a two- to three-year period where I was working myself out.”

Support from Coaching Staff

And now, he has been given a fresh challenge to tackle. Banton is thankful to have been given another chance, and also for the coach's skill to make him comfortable while he figures out how best to grasp it. “The coach came up to me before [the recent game] and said, ‘Head out and express yourself.’ It's reassuring to have that liberty,” Banton said. “I know it’s just a brief comment from the staff, but it provides the support that if it doesn’t come off, it’s not a disaster. It’s something so minor but for me it’s, ‘OK, I’ve got the approval from the head coach and I can step up and do it.’”

Shift in Location and Squad Decisions

After playing the initial matches of the series at Christchurch’s Hagley Park, a stadium with unusually long boundaries, the visitors complete it on Thursday at Eden Park, a dual-purpose rugby and cricket ground where the field edge at 55m is among the most compact in the sport. With uncertain weather and an new location they have abandoned their usual practice of announcing their lineup ahead of time while they work out if their ideal XI here will be the same as the one that started the earlier fixtures.

Upcoming Changes for One-Day Matches

On Friday, they travel to the coastal town and shift attention to ODIs, with a somewhat changed team: three players are omitted, while Jofra Archer, Ben Duckett, Joe Root and Jamie Smith come in. Three of those players landed in the city on the same day but the scheduling of the bowler's Ashes preparations means he will follow later, flying with two fellow bowlers, two seamers who are also preparing for the longer format in the away series but are excluded from the white-ball squad. As a result Archer will be absent for the opening game at Bay Oval, the ground where he was racially abused on his sole prior visit, in a few years back.