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The English side's preparations for a warm, arid 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 conduct the final practice run before their next match against the Kiwis indoors. The purpose isn't always clear what role these two-team contests fulfill, what useful lessons could possibly be learned – but on this instance, for at least one of the players, that is not an issue.

The Batter's New Role: From Opener to Lower Down

The cricketer says he is “still learning now”, and if it is the kind of line often repeated even by players who have long since scaled the peak of their game, in his case it is certainly accurate. After building his name as a top-order batter, mostly as an opener, Banton now occupies a totally new role, batting at five or six. “I didn't have too many conversations,” he said. “They simply brought me back into the team and told, ‘Your role will be in the lower batting lineup now.’”

Prior to returning in the summer, the vast majority of Banton’s over 160 senior T20 innings had been as an starting batsman, a further portion at No3 and the rest – but for seven balls at seventh spot in a T20 Blast game eight years ago – at No 4. If the team intend to retain him in this altered role he needs every chance to get used to it, and he has figured out one thing: “Playing down the order,” he surmised, “is a lot harder than opening.”

Mixed Results in the Tour

Banton said that “sometimes where it comes off and it appears brilliant and on other occasions where it doesn’t”, and the initial matches of the tour in the host nation have featured one of each. In the opener, he faced nine balls and made a low score before getting out to long-on; in the next game, he played a dozen balls, hit runs, and finished not out.

Reflections on Return and Growth

The current series has seen Banton return to the nation in which he made his international debut in November 2019. After that, he moved away of the team, had a short comeback in 2022 and then spent a long period in the sidelines before returning for the new captain's first T20 as England captain. “During the journey, it was weird,” he said. “It was six years ago when I made my debut. Seems a lot has happened in that period. I've discovered a lot about me. The period after I was left out from England was a tough time for me. I had a couple of years period where I was working myself out.”

Backing from Coaching Staff

And now, he has been given something new to work out. Banton is grateful to have been offered a return, and also for Brendon McCullum’s ability to make him comfortable while he works out how best to seize the opportunity. “The coach came up to me before [the recent game] and said, ‘Go 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 gives me the backing that if it doesn’t come off, it’s not a disaster. It is so minor but for me it’s, ‘OK, I’ve got the backing from the head coach and I can step up and perform.’”

Shift in Location and Squad Decisions

After playing the first two games of the series at Christchurch’s Hagley Park, a venue with unusually long boundaries, the visitors finish the series on the next day at the Auckland arena, a dual-purpose sports facility where the field edge at 55m is among the shortest in the world. With uncertain weather and an unfamiliar venue they have abandoned their usual practice of revealing their lineup two days in advance while they determine if their preferred team here will be the identical as the one that began the earlier fixtures.

Squad Adjustments for ODI Series

On Friday, they move to Mount Maunganui and shift attention to ODIs, with a slightly amended team: Jordan Cox, Zak Crawley and Phil Salt 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 timing of Archer’s Ashes preparations means he will arrive later, travelling with two fellow bowlers, two seamers who are also building towards the longer format in the away series but are not in the limited-overs team. As a result he will be absent for the first match at Bay Oval, the ground where he was racially abused on his sole prior visit, in 2019.