An aggressive mindset is fine but sometimes there needs to be a little more assessment of conditions
Sidharth Monga at The Oval06-Jun-2019First ball of spin. Martin Guptill lifts Mehidy Hasan with the spin and wide of long-on, between the only two men allowed outside the circle. Six. This is the second over of the innings.First ball of the next over of spin. Guptill sweeps a full ball from in front of the stumps, and beats the inner ring. Four. This is the fourth over of the innings.First ball of the next over of spin. Guptill tries to hit Shakib Al Hasan inside-out with the spin, but the ball holds up and doesn’t turn and runs off the inside half of the bat straight to long-on for a simple catch. Wicket. This is just the sixth over of the innings. Despite the scoreboard that says 35 for 0 in five overs in a chase of 245.Mehidy Hasan celebrates after dismissing Kane Williamson•Getty Images
Colin Munro tries to slog-sweep Shakib early doors and is caught. Most out of character is how Kane Williamson ends up chipping a lob to deep midwicket after getting in.There is nothing wrong per se in attacking spin. Sometimes you can lose wickets doing so, which comes with the territory, but you need to look within where the attacking shots came from. This chase – on a day that New Zealand bowled and fielded superbly to restrict Bangladesh to 244 in conditions that suited the opposition more – might suggest these shots came out of a lack of assurance against spin. Out of fear that Bangladesh could bowl 30 overs of it if they didn’t get stuck into them early. They still ended up losing six wickets to 28 overs of spin that brought them 127 runs.ALSO READ: Bangladesh bowling attack exposed for lack of wicket-takersAll three of the shots Guptill played were low-percentage options even keeping in mind the field restrictions. More importantly they came without an assessment of what the pitch was doing, if the ball was stopping or gripping.New Zealand’s top-scorer, Ross Taylor, and Mitchell Santner, who scored a crucial unbeaten 17 to see them home, admitted they were put under pressure by the Bangladesh spinners. You could put James Neesham’s dismissal down as one brought about by that pressure. Taylor and Tom Latham were slightly unfortunate: Latham hit a long hop down the throat of deep midwicket. Guptill and Munro seemingly didn’t trust themselves to just milk the bowling. Williamson played a rare loose shot.WATCH – Highlights of New Zealand’s wickets on Hotstar (India only)It will be disappointing for a side that countered India’s wristspinners well in Indian conditions not too long ago. Other teams are watching. Expect Afghanistan, their next opponents, and India and Pakistan later to bowl a lot of spin at New Zealand. Especially if the pitch is as slow as the one at The Oval. It was slower than it looked it would be, and it was also slower than the one New Zealand played their warm-up game on.”At the toss we thought the pitch would play quicker than it did,” Santner said. “It was slower than we thought, and obviously when a side has world-class spinners like Bangladesh do, you have to take that into account. It is [about] the way we are able to rotate the spinners and then put some pressure back on by hitting the bad ball. I guess through the middle there it might have been [about] soaking up a bit more pressure than we did and then try to cash in later. But credit has to go to Bangladesh, the way they bowled.”And this was a pitch that didn’t really have much turn; it was just slow. “If Taunton spins, it is right up Afghanistan’s alley,” Santner said. “We have to reflect on the way we played against spin tonight and then try and move on and find ways to counter what happened. Nice to get over the line today but we have to park that and move on pretty quickly.”Compare it to how India approached a similarly small run chase on the same day 80 miles southwest of The Oval, at the Hampshire Bowl. If this pitch was slow, that pitch was in theory more difficult to bat on with the help it had for the seamers. India chose to ride out the storm because they believed South Africa had only one wicket-taking threat in Kagiso Rabada. Chris Morris’s effectiveness must have come as a surprise to them but India didn’t look to hit out against either of them.In the end, India achieved a clinical win by six wickets, a word Taylor used often in his press conference. In that New Zealand were not as clinical as they would have wanted to be. The difference here, perhaps, was that New Zealand knew Bangladesh had three spinners. They might have got lucky with an lbw call in the dying moments, but generally they were at the wrong end of it.On another day Taylor would have clipped that wide down the leg side for a couple to fine leg instead of edging it for a catch at the wicket, and New Zealand would have won by six wickets. There wouldn’t have been the tension of a two-wicket win. They wouldn’t have let the crowd back into the game – although when really are Bangladesh crowds out of it? – and wouldn’t have had to finish the game off in atmosphere resembling “Chittagong”. It tense if Trent Boult has had his pads on.But all of this happened, and that should leave New Zealand unhappy with this chase. They batted like a side that didn’t believe it had a middling chase under control even though Taylor later said that it was as straightforward as batting out the 50 overs. They will be happy with the bowling effort in conditions not ideal for their style, with the fielding, with the calm they found in the tense finale, but they will be leaving themselves open to reverses if they don’t work hard on their batting against spin.
