Zak Foulkes said that before play on Saturday New Zealand decided to attempt a new method of outfoxing England’s batters: by staying “as boring as possible”. If the process was deliberately dull, the results were electrifying. Having started their first innings on Friday by scoring 223 at 4.96 an over for the loss of just two wickets, the next day England completed it by scoring 131 at 3.02 an over, while losing eight. For the English it was, as Shoaib Bashir put it, “quite disappointing”.
“We just tried to stay as boring as possible really and try to dry out the runs,” said Foulkes. “Yesterday they got off to a fast start and we had to peg it back and peg it back, and we knew if we could dry it up, things could happen in our favour.”
