90th Plus: New Zealand 326-4 (Mitchell 82, Blundell 73) The gusts of wind and Broad’s hair blow up like a crescent growing from a boiled eggshell. Blundell leans toward one wide and deftly cuts slips for four. A pair of sweet inswingers bring no reward.
89th Final: New Zealand 320-4 (Mitchell 82, Blundell 67) Anderson picks up where he left off yesterday, though, as they point out on the radio, he and Broad have changed sides. A touch of swing and she is a maiden.
88th on: New Zealand 320-4 (Mitchell 82, Blundell 67) It’s Stuart Broad, with a white Rambo-style headband on his forehead, his butter fingers slipping with his hands in his pockets as the wind blows them. Just one of them.
The first bell of the day rings at the OBO:
@tjaldred Good morning Tanya. My biggest fear today (there are many others) would be that Root gets so angry with his Mitchell drop, that he will try too hard to fix himself with the bat, and get out cheap. If that happens then we have a lot of options.
– Brendan Large (@brendanlarge) June 11, 2022
Hymns sound and Jimmy Anderson repeatedly throws a beach ball to the ground.
Yesterday England fell four trapped, can they be repaired today? We can see these drops in their entirety, although Graeme Swann says it’s very hard to get caught slipping on Trent Bridge when the sun goes down.
I found this statistic last year: Lord’s now seems like an aberration.
Since early 2019, England’s slippery cordon is statistically the worst in the world in terms of catches. They fall more than 1 in 4. #ENGvIND
– The CricViz Analyst (@cricvizanalyst) August 6, 2021
And a couple of jokes about cricket and philosophy:
Tom Morgan: “What do the XI philosophers do when the ball is old? They turn to Spinoza.”
and Phil Keegan. Anyway, “How do you contact a French phonetics expert? Phone – ihm. In fact, I’m not sure this will work in print. You have to say “phoneme” with an exaggerated French accent in the second syllable. I’ll bring my coat. “
Just to polish some of yesterday’s emails, while Ian Ward (not so well ironed) talks to Chris Woakes about his career.
A shout out to Mike Brearley of Colum Fordham “The most obvious intellectual among the cricket fraternity that comes to mind is Michael Brearley. He has a Ph.D. in the late 1970s and wearing helmets for beaters.He became a leading psychoanalyst.
“He came to play an Old Boys game in 1986 when I was a student and I thought he was a very nice guy. I got him to take my turn, which is my only claim to cricket fame.”
An elegant gesture from New Zealand:
On Sky, Chris Woakes and Simon Doull talk about bowling. Woakes wears the most flawlessly ironed clothes I’ve ever seen: congratulations to Sky’s wardrobe department.
Preamble
Good morning! England is starting to need fast ports today and split the partnership between Daryl Mitchell and Tom Blundell. Sound familiar? At Lord’s, Mitchell reached his hundredth, Blundell did not, but the rest of the New Zealand middle order crumbled like a crushed biscotti. Can Broad, and Potts and Anderson and Stokes, with Leach, do it again?
The game starts in 40 minutes.