England vs New Zealand: Mitchell and Blundell partnership provides a template for batting at Lord’s – Firstcricket News, Firstpost

There have been 23 two-day Tests in cricket history, from The Oval in 1882 to Abu Dhabi in 2021, and when Day Two picked up from where the frenetic pace of Day One had left off, it appeared as if a 24th, and a first in England since 2000, could soon be joining that exclusive club.

For now, though these shores will have to wait a little longer for another Test to be wrapped up in under six sessions, with Daryl Mitchell and Tom Blundell batting proceedings into the third day and New Zealand into an increasingly fearsome position in a partnership that bucked the trend of everything that had come before.

New Zealand’s Daryl Mitchell and Tom Blundell celebrate their 100 run partnership during the second day of Lord’s Test. AP

The tourists were 56/4 when Mitchell and Blundell came together after lunch, just 50 runs ahead in a match that had seen 24 wickets fall in just over four sessions, by the close they were 236/4, 227 ahead – England facing an uphill task just to stay in the game.

This was not just a match-defining partnership, it was practically the first partnership of any substance in the Test, just the second to reach 50 in a game defined by bowling superiority and batting ineptitude.

For an England side with a desperate desire to climb back up the Test rankings, this was a lesson they would do well to learn from, with New Zealand correcting the mistakes of their own first innings to bat the hosts into submission.

Under pressure in the first innings and stunned by the loss of six wickets before lunch, New Zealand had then decided attack was the best form of defence, a tactic that did take their score to something more respectable but also did little to prevent the flow of wickets – and ensured Colin De Grandhomme ran out of partners, just as batting was starting to look a little more comfortable.

It was not a mistake that they would repeat the second time around. Mitchell and Blundell remained calm in the face of a second top-order capitulation, happy this time to sit in and make life difficult for England’s bowlers, confident in their assertion that conditions would eventually become more conducive to run scoring.

It was a tactic that paid off handsomely, the hosts’ attack worn down and blunted by a pair long on experience, if not necessarily in the Test arena. As England’s Plan A failed to deliver they looked increasingly short of ideas, reduced to trying to bounce the batsmen out with a Ben Stokes barrage.

How England missed the pace of the injured Jofra Archer or Mark Wood, their bowlers increasingly powerless to trouble New Zealand’s well-embedded pair as the day wore on – the introduction of Matt Parkinson not yet providing the much-discussed point of difference that some hoped it would.

It was though a fairly flawless display of Test match batting from Mitchell and Blundell, flying in the face of everything that had come before it in a game that had up until that point seen an average of almost six wickets fall in every session.

In the end, it was a near-textbook example of how a batter can survive and then prosper in the longest form of the game, a partnership that has turned the game decisively in New Zealand’s favour and that England would do well to emulate if they are to have any hope of turning it back.

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