Consolation Victory for NZ Women

This post is a two parter, first looking back at last night’s game and then looking at selections for the T20 leg of England’s tour of India.

NZW V ENGW

With the series safely won (note to the England Men’s team – this is how you do it) England rested veteran pace bowler Katherine Brunt ahead of the upcoming T20 series. Heather Knight won the toss and chose to bat. Tammy Beaumont came up trumps (88 not out) and so did Knight herself (60), but no one else was able to anything significant, and England were held to 220, with every New Zealand bowler doing well. Amelia Kerr with 4-42 had the best figures.

New Zealand lost two early wickets, and were still 170 short win Sophie Devine was third out, but Amy Satterthwaite was already playing brilliantly and Amelia Kerr now joined her, and try as they might England could do nothing as New Zealand reached the target with this pair still together, Satterthwaite 119 not out and Kerr 72 not out.

ENGLAND XI FOR THE 1ST 20

There is a ‘choose your England XI for the first T20’ up on wisden.com, which is fun to play. The XI I chose attracted some comment on twitter, mainly positive, and I am now going to go into more detail here. Below is my XI:

There were five players available to be picked who I did not select: Liam Livingstone, Sam Billings, Tom Curran, Reece Topley and Mark Wood. I regarded the top four as must picks, given their records, considered Stokes as a necessity since very few good T20 sides don’t have a front line bowler who bats in the top half of the order, and Morgan is the current captain and it would be huge shout to replace him and name a new captain. Sam Curran has genuine all round skills, as does Moeen Ali with the only member of this XI to have no sort of batting pedigree at international level being Jofra Archer at no11. The five players picked mainly on account of their bowling skills re respectively left arm fast medium, off spin, leg spin, right arm fast medium with lots of variation and right arm fast, an excellent range of bowling, with Stokes, right arm fast medium, there as a sixth genuine option. This latter is an insurance policy against someone having a horror day with the ball. My second choice line up from the players available would be to have the two Bs, Bairstow and Buttler open the batting, Malan at three, Livingstone (who can also bowl spin, though he is not a front line option in this department) at four, and nos 5-11 unchanged.

PHOTOGRAPHS

My usual sign off, bolstered by some full moon shots from Friday evening…

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