Standing at the top of his mark for Brook’s first full over in the middle is Matt Henry. England are 27-3 thanks largely to Henry’s early work. He muzzled the usually assertive Ben Duckett earlier in the piece before castling a restless Zak Crawley with a dismissal that was painfully inevitable. Henry has figures of 5-4-4-2, taking his overall record for the year to a Bumrah-esque 40 wickets at 15. In his hand is an 11-over ball that is still talking.
Henry starts with two nibbling seamers on a length, both honing in towards Brook’s off stump. The first delivery is diligently defended hard into the ground. The second beats Brook on the outside edge, Henry millimetres away from getting the key man. Perhaps exasperated by that near miss, Henry tries something different for the first time that day, firing in a slippery yorker that Brook digs out. Three balls in, Brook hasn’t hit Henry off the square and he already has the opposition’s spearhead veering from a Plan A that was working wonders for him.
Ball four, though, is where the dynamic really changes. Henry reverts to length and Brook greets the ball several yards down the track. It’s a pre-meditated counter-attack – if Henry is bowling so well, why let him settle? He doesn’t time it but he gets it away for two. 27-3 becomes 29-3.
On ball five, another new thing happens – Henry bowls a bad ball, his first of the day. The ball is slightly too full and slightly too wide. Brook leans on it and sends it on its way to the fence. 33-3. Did the intent shown previously impact what came out of Henry’s hand the following ball? Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it was the start of a momentum change in the morning session, with Brook the active character in that dial shift.
In the following over Jacob Bethell is strangled down the leg side and England are 43-4 as Ollie Pope strides out to the middle. Like he did in Christchurch, Nathan Smith has two early wickets. By the time Smith starts his next over, England are 50-4. By the time Smith finishes his next over, England are 70-4. Sixteen of those 20 runs are struck off Brook’s blade, six of them in one ball via an outrageous inside-out lofted heave over the extra cover boundary.
Fast forward 50 minutes and England reach the interval on 124-4. Brook is 51 off 55 and remarkably, England, having been sent in first thing, are basically level in the contest despite having lost four wickets in the opening hour. Less than an hour of play later and Brook already has his hundred; 49 runs come off his first 36 deliveries after lunch. 100 runs in a session is a very real prospect before New Zealand starve him of the strike after the fall of Pope just before drinks; in the hour after drinks, Brook faces just 23 balls and with him off strike, New Zealand find a way back in the game. In that hour, Brook’s partners, Ben Stokes and Chris Woakes, registered a solitary single between them – in other words, once Brook lost the strike, he stayed off strike. Does Brook look for a non-existent single on the stroke of tea if there had been a steadier exchange of strike?
Either way, the run out ended a masterclass from Brook, a knock that bludgeoned England back into the contest after a disastrous first hour. Objectively, there was a wild aura to Brook’s start. There was an element of fortune in the way that he either middled it or missed it with nothing in between. But it was a punt that brought in the cash. He hit the ball out of shape and New Zealand off their length and changed the feel of the Test over the course of two exhilarating hours.
England on top after day one of the Wellington Test.
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) December 6, 2024
Scorecard: https://t.co/2xSQO6UJvJ#NZvENG pic.twitter.com/srWwLghllu
Back to Gower’s earlier question, this is where we are now with Harry Brook. Twenty-theee Tests into his career and still just 25 years old, we are already at the point where his genius isn’t up for debate – the question on the lips of this former England captain, is specifically, what sort of genius are we watching?
The numbers are mind-boggling. He averages 62 from 23 Tests with eight hundreds to his name already. There is a reasonable chance he will climb to the top of the ICC Test batting rankings next week, barely two years after his debut. In away Tests, he averages 92 and strikes at 96 – no one has ever done this before. He has seven overseas hundreds in 10 Tests; already just one fewer than Gower and Pietersen’s career tallies away from home.
And watching him, extreme success seems plausible. His defensive game is not only sound but it is something he approaches with the same vigour as his attacking play. There is a proactivity in his defence – for Brook, a forward defence is more than just an absence of a run-scoring shot, everything about it is deliberate and precise. For a guy who strikes at 96 in away Tests, his defence against pace is quietly extraordinary. He has so far only been bowled three times by seam in Test cricket, only one of those instances – against Cummins at Lord’s last year – saw Brook actively try to defend the ball. In two and a half years, pace has breached his defence just once. It was notable today just how much less grief the pace and bounce of Will O’Rourke caused Brook compared to his teammates.
He is a supreme strike rotator, too. Like Root and Pope, he is able to turn good balls into single-pinching opportunities, arguably, as his final hour at the crease showed, to his detriment at times. And of course, it’s the array of attacking options at his disposal that generate the genius chat more than anything else. The lofted drives over cover that more often than not go for six, his ability to turn a bowler’s accuracy into a weakness by targeting good length balls, his range of options against the short ball, his variety of attacking shots is as great as any batter currently out there. And when you combine all of that, you get innings like the one he produced today, where he is able to flip the status quo and almost regardless of his side’s predicament is able to apply pressure back onto the bowlers.
Day one in Wellington saw 15 wickets fall for 366 runs. 174 of those came in two hours with Brook and Pope at the crease either side of lunch. Brook’s technical ability combined with his game sense totally flipped the course of the match up until that point.
Whatever the sort of genius Gower decides he is, England have a diamond in their hands.
