For the second game in a row England donned their pyjamas and calmly put New Zealand to bed. After Jonny Bairstow and Harry Brook powered the home side to a daunting total of 198 for four the Kiwis crumbled – halfway through their reply they were 77 for five and from there their task was already forlorn; less than four overs later the game was over, England winning by the mammoth margin of 95 runs.
True, halfway through their own innings England had scored one run fewer, but they had lost only two wickets and were starting to purr. Brook’s omission was the big talking point of their provisional World Cup squad and with each passing innings the decision looks more puzzling. Here he was magnificent, coming in with England 43 for two and the game in the balance, and departing with the score 174 for three and his team ascendant.
The 24-year-old tried a couple of ramps and made contact with neither – one attempt provoking a scream of frustration – but beyond that there were few missteps until he finally lifted one into the hands of Finn Allen at long on, having scored five fours and as many sixes.
He made particularly good use of the reverse sweep – one in particular, off a Mitchell Santner delivery that pitched well wide of leg stump, was dazzlingly executed – and alongside the finesse came explosions of savage power.
His partnership with Bairstow was match-defining, worth 131 off 64 balls. Bairstow’s was an innings of three thirds, featuring a slow start – he scored 26 off his first 28 balls, reflecting a deliberate policy, as he put it, “to bide our time a little bit” – and a pedestrian end of 13 off 13. In between he scored 51 off 19, a period when he and Brook were virtually unplayable. “We were just batting,” Brook deadpanned. Along the way one Tim Southee over went for 23, the second most expensive of the Kiwi captain’s 112-game international career, featuring two Bairstow sixes and another from Brook.
With six overs of England’s innings remaining Bairstow, on 79, looked certain to become the third Englishman to score international centuries in all three formats, but from there he was starved of the strike and accomplished little when he had it. He ended up facing precisely half of England’s deliveries, scoring an unbeaten 86, and still being profoundly outshone.
The first sign that this would not be New Zealand’s night came half an hour before the game even started, when Eoin Morgan – conducting the televised toss – declared the coin had landed heads up and asked Southee to make his choice, before Jos Buttler pointed out that he seemed to be looking at a tail (as with Daryl Mitchell’s dismissal a little later, to a superb delivery from Brydon Carse, a fine review from England’s captain).
Buttler then added to the sense of everything being upside down by deciding to bat first, a rare choice from an England captain in this format. But the more notable change was Gus Atkinson’s selection to make his international debut in place of Luke Wood: the 25-year-old went on to take four wickets, including three in five balls to bring the game to a premature close with more than six overs unbowled.
“We’ll just have to regroup,” said Adam Milne. “We like to keep things pretty calm in our changing room and not get too high or too low. We’ll have a bit of a review of the game, try to find those bits of improvements and hopefully come out at Edgbaston [on Sunday] and throw some shots from our end.”
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That review will make for grisly watching. At least New Zealand had a little success early in England’s innings; their own started poorly and got worse. There was a moment, when Mark Chapman and Tim Seifert bludgeoned a six and two fours in the first four deliveries of Liam Livingstone’s only over of the night, when they hinted at some kind of resurgence, but then Chapman dumped the final delivery into the hands of Brook at long-off and the grim procession resumed.
Atkinson eventually stamped out the dying embers of their innings. Seifert had been their one bright spark but he skied the first ball of the 14th over, three balls later Southee was trapped lbw and then Lockie Ferguson was clean bowled to end it.
“They’re a blooming good team,” Bairstow said. “We know how dangerous they can be. We can’t take for granted how good those two performances have been. But that wasn’t by any means the perfect game – we’ll go to Edgbaston looking to go better.”
