Key events
The pitch is flat, but it’s dry so might crumble later in the game. I can’t see any way you win the toss and don’t bat.
Now Nas, quoting Mike Brearley, is explaining that, as captain, you don’t realise how much you love the job till you don’t have it anymore, adding that the hardest thing to take when you do the job is the toll it takes on your own form.
Broady, meanwhile, tells us that Stokes can get “quite obsessive” with the fitness and so on – Roy Keane and Meg Lanning have both found that – adding that he’s not looked happy or relaxed over the last bit and is at his best when batting with freedom. Perhaps, then, the break will have done him good.
Speaking to Athers yesterday in tape we’re seeing now, Stokes tries to sound grateful to be back, is grateful for the love he had from supporters, and it’s nice to play in front of people who appreciate you; it’s said gently, but it sounds like a message to those above him. Previously, Stuart Broad observed that, at his core, he probably doesn’t feel he did much wrong.
Otherwise, he reckons the change of environment, to one a little more relaxed at Durham, has helped getting his batting going again – he needed to simplify things, he reckons.
Preamble
We all like feeling vindicated. It brings a sense of wellbeing, a sense of confidence, a sense of smug.
But when we feel vindicated and others do not, that’s a whole new plain of feeling – especially if those others are our bosses, and those others, our bosses, have first assumed it was they who were right and we who were wrong, then intimated the same to the public, then dished out a consequence having let someone else away with worse, then endured a disastrous week at work to reverse the great work done previously, while taking an unfathomable amount of time to investigate a scandal that was not exactly Enron. Yes, that might be described – but almost definitely wasn’t – as a whole new plain of feeling entirely.
Of feeling not uniformly positive, it seems fair to assume, just as it does that sentiments have been shared and analyses aired. But here we are: Ben Stokes is back and Gus Atkinson is back, Robert Key and Brendon McCullum are under pressure, and a series decider is even more exciting than it would otherwise have been.
A win for England and things might move on; a win for New Zealand and it might be people moving on; this is not a contest that “lacks context”, and it’s going to be intense.
Play: 11am BST
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