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The English side's training sessions for a hot, dry T20 World Cup in India in the coming month brought them on Wednesday to a cool, drizzly New Zealand's largest city, where they were forced to hold the last practice run before their next match against New Zealand indoors. It is not always obvious what purpose these bilateral series fulfill, what useful lessons could possibly be learned – but on this occasion, for at least one of the players, that is not an issue.

The Batter's New Role: Starting Batsman to Lower Down

The cricketer says he is “still learning now”, and if it is the type of statement often repeated even by players who have already reached the peak of their game, in his case it is certainly accurate. After building his name as a frontline hitter, mostly as an starting player, Banton suddenly finds himself a completely unfamiliar role, coming in at the middle order. “There weren’t really too many discussions,” he said. “They simply brought me back into the squad and informed me, ‘Your role will be in the middle order now.’”

Prior to returning in June, the vast majority of Banton’s 162 professional T20 appearances had been as an starting batsman, a further portion at third position and the remaining handful – but for a brief stint at seventh spot in a T20 Blast game eight years ago – at No 4. If the team intend to keep him in this altered role he needs every chance to become accustomed to it, and he has figured out one thing: “Playing down the order,” he surmised, “is a lot harder than starting the innings.”

Varied Performances in the Tour

The player noted that “sometimes where it works well and it appears brilliant and on other occasions where it fails”, and the first two games of the tour in the host nation have seen one of each. In the opener, he lasted a few deliveries and made a low score before holing out to long-on; in the next game, he faced 12 deliveries, hit runs, and finished not out.

Thoughts on Comeback and Development

The current series has witnessed Banton return to the country in which he first played for his country in November 2019. Since then, he drifted back out of the team, made a brief return in 2022 and then passed more than three years in the wilderness before returning for Harry Brook’s first T20 as skipper. “During the journey, it was weird,” he said. “Time has passed when I made my debut. Seems a lot has occurred in that time. I’ve learned a lot about myself. The period after I got dropped from the national team was a tough time for me. I had a couple of years stretch where I was working myself out.”

Support from Team Management

Currently, he has been given something new to work out. Banton is grateful to have been offered a return, and also for the coach's skill to make him comfortable while he works out how best to grasp it. “The coach came up to me before [the recent game] and said, ‘Go out and express yourself.’ It’s nice to have that liberty,” Banton said. “I know it’s only a small thing from the staff, but it gives me the backing that if it doesn't work, it’s not the end of the world. It’s something so small but for me it’s, ‘Alright, I’ve got the approval from the manager and I can step up and do it.’”

Shift in Location and Squad Decisions

After playing the first two games of the contest at Christchurch’s Hagley Park, a venue with unusually long boundaries, England complete it on Thursday at the Auckland arena, a multi-use rugby and cricket ground where the straight boundary at 55m is among the shortest in the world. With changeable conditions and an unfamiliar venue they have dropped their usual practice of announcing their team two days in advance while they work out if their ideal XI for this match will be the same as the side that began the earlier fixtures.

Squad Adjustments for One-Day Matches

On Friday, they move to the coastal town and shift attention to ODIs, with a somewhat changed squad: Jordan Cox, Zak Crawley and Phil Salt are omitted, while four others join the squad. Three of those players landed in Auckland on Wednesday but the scheduling of Archer’s Test match buildup implies he will follow later, travelling with Mark Wood and Josh Tongue, two seamers who are also building towards the longer format in Australia but are excluded from the limited-overs team. As a result Archer will be absent for the first match at the venue, the ground where he was racially abused on his sole prior visit, in a few years back.