Four years to the day after England’s first Test under Brendon McCullum began against New Zealand at Lord’s, the start of a summer when players reached new heights and observers reached for new words to describe them, the latest incarnations of the two teams gathered in St John’s Wood as preparations ramped up for the rematch. Once again the series will begin amid talk of England adopting a fresh approach.
In 2022 New Zealand batted first in all three games and in all three England chased down testing targets to seal victory. The attacking approach McCullum instigated that summer was embodied most memorably by Jonny Bairstow. In more than a century of Test cricket before that year (not counting the early years of the game, when that kind of data was not gathered) only three English players had scored more than 300 runs in a series at a strike rate above 85. In only four years since another 10 have joined their number, a list topped by Bairstow against the Kiwis in 2022, when he rampaged to 394 runs at a strike rate of 120.12. That figure has been bettered only once, and even then marginally, in cricket history, though the 330 runs at 121.32 banked by Pakistan’s Shahid Afridi against India in 2006 were largely down to his contributions to a pair of high-scoring draws on batting-friendly pitches.
