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The English side's preparations for a warm, arid T20 World Cup in the subcontinent in the coming month led them on Wednesday to a cool, drizzly New Zealand's largest city, where they were forced to conduct the final training session before their next match against New Zealand indoors. It is not always obvious what purpose these bilateral series serve, what useful lessons could possibly be learned – but on this instance, for at least one of the players, that is no concern.

Tom Banton's Changed Position: From Opener to Middle Order

Tom Banton says he is “still learning now”, and if it is the type of statement regularly trotted out even by athletes who have long since scaled the peak of their sport, in his case it is undeniably true. After building his name as a frontline hitter, primarily as an opener, Banton now occupies a totally new position, coming in at the middle order. “I didn't have too many discussions,” he said. “They simply brought me back into the squad and informed me, ‘You’re going to bat in the middle order now.’”

Before his recall in June, 87% of Banton’s 162 senior T20 innings had been as an opener, 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 fourth place. If England plan to keep him in this altered role he requires every chance to become accustomed to it, and he has already worked out a key point: “Playing down the order,” he concluded, “is a much tougher than opening.”

Mixed Results in the Tour

The player noted that “there’s going to be times where it works well and it looks great and on other occasions where it doesn’t”, and the first two games of the tour in the host nation have seen both outcomes. In the opener, he lasted nine balls and scored a low score before getting out to long-on; in the next game, he faced a dozen balls, hit runs, and finished not out.

Reflections on Return and Development

This tour has witnessed Banton come back to the country in which he first played for his country in late 2019. After that, he drifted back out of the side, made a brief return in 2022 and then spent more than three years in the sidelines before coming back for the new captain's first T20 as skipper. “On the flight over, it was strange,” he said. “It was six years ago when I made my debut. Seems a lot has occurred in that time. I’ve learned a lot about myself. The few years after I got dropped from the national team was a tough time for me. I had a couple of years stretch where I was finding my way.”

Support from Team Management

And now, he has been assigned a fresh challenge to tackle. Banton is grateful to have been given another chance, and also for Brendon McCullum’s ability to put him at ease while he figures out how best to grasp it. “The coach approached me before [the recent game] and said, ‘Head out and play your natural game.’ It’s nice to have that freedom,” 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 manager and I can go out and perform.’”

Venue Change and Team Selection

Following the first two games of the contest at the South Island ground, a venue with unusually long boundaries, England finish the series on Thursday at Eden Park, a multi-use sports facility where the straight boundary at 55m is among the most compact in the world. With changeable conditions and an unfamiliar venue they have dropped their recent habit of announcing their team two days in advance while they work out if their ideal XI here will be the same as the side that began both previous games.

Squad Adjustments for ODI Series

On Friday, they travel to Mount Maunganui and shift attention to ODIs, with a somewhat changed team: Jordan Cox, Zak Crawley and Phil Salt drop out, while four others come in. Three of those players landed in Auckland on Wednesday but the timing of the bowler's Ashes preparations implies he will arrive later, travelling with two fellow bowlers, fast bowlers who are also preparing for the longer format in the away series but are not in the white-ball squad. Consequently he will miss the opening game at Bay Oval, the stadium where he was subjected to abuse on his only previous appearance, in 2019.