With a good-looking wicket, a clear day, and a house full crowd at Lords, there was still something that added on that day when 17 wickets fell and the narrative of the slightly delayed start of summer got changed.
The manifesto got stronger when England’s Matthew Potts, the debutant was dismissed for a duck, leaving England at 100/7. Just a few hours before, Potts sealed a four-wicket haul in the first-ever red-ball series at Lord’s and also made a few catches to his name.
One of the batters he caught was Kyle Jamieson, who later paved the way through England’s batting order collapse when England made a half-century opening stand.
With a good-looking wicket, a clear day, and a house full crowd at Lords, there was still something that added on that day when 17 wickets fell and the narrative of the slightly delayed start of summer got changed.
“The first one I didn’t see!” Potts said of Jamieson’s catch.
“I looked up and thought ‘oh no, can it not go to deep square instead of fine leg’.”
He was quick to add,
“But when the ball goes up, I’ll always put my hand forward and try to catch the ball…I was focused on the job at hand.”
It was a big day for Potts as he picked the wicket of Kane Williamson in his first over of the Test cricket and was competing for a five-for with the veteran James Anderson at one point in the game but the emotions were different when Trent Boult replaced him later in the day.
“Yes, it was a rollercoaster,”
Potts said.
“Yes, I wanted to take the boots off and just put the feet up, but then again I’m batting eight.
“We’ve come to entertain, that’s our thing first and foremost, and it’s been an entertaining day of cricket. It’s one that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, I know the team’s enjoyed it. We’re still in a contest to win a game of Test cricket and we’re going to attack the day tomorrow. We’re going to throw our punches. If they throw us two, we’ll throw them four.”
That perhaps wasn’t the mood at the Lord’s balcony with New Zealand down at 39/6 at Lunch. Jamieson revealed that they were calm even after the terrible collapse and once they came out to bowl with 132 on the board, they felt they were right in the game.
It was a day at Lords which had no hanging clouds and the surface sitting quietly in the middle of all.
“I’m not too sure, I’m not very good at reading pitches either,”
Jamieson said.
“I’m not really too sure what the go was there. Obviously, a few wickets fell (but) it didn’t look that way initially. It probably unfolded quite differently from what we thought at the start of the day, what we were thinking was probably a par score wasn’t what we got to.
“We spoke about 130 [at Lunch], which doesn’t necessarily sound great. But where we were at, we thought ‘130, if we could get there and get a few wickets today, then we’re right in the game’. We knew we had to bowl well but when things tend to happen here, they tend to happen pretty quickly and we were seeing that through the first part of the day.
“It was a good fightback. Obviously, it wasn’t ideal how we started the game…When we walked out there to bowl, it wasn’t ideal, but we knew we had time to get ourselves back in the game. And to sit here now having done that is quite nice, and hopefully, we can press forward tomorrow as well.”
There were no winners on day 1 as after England bowlers paved their way through the New Zealand batting order and then Jamieson took the revenge to get back in the action.
