Black Caps counting on Boult to blank Aussie gun

By Kris Shannon

After being beaten by a specialist in the first game against Australia, the Black Caps are counting on their own T20 professional to save the series.

New Zealand were run down with the final ball on Wednesday as Tim David muscled Tim Southee to the Sky Stadium boundary, capping a 31-run outburst in 10 match-changing deliveries.

David’s destruction helped Australia overhaul the hosts’ 215-3, marking their third-highest successful chase. The series now concludes at the venue where in 2018 they achieved their best, with Eden Park hosting game two tonight and the potentially deciding rubber on Sunday.

If the Black Caps have little first-hand experience of David – the thriller in Wellington was their second sight of the 27-year-old – Australia possess plenty of knowledge about the not-so-secret weapon they must defuse this weekend.

Trent Boult will be playing his first T20 international since November 2022 and first home international of any kind since a month earlier, having transitioned to full-time life on the T20 franchise circuit.

It’s an existence David knows well. But unlike Boult, who became a hired gun after a long and successful international career, the Australian established himself as a T20 expert while barely featuring for his country.

Taking a path becoming increasingly common in modern cricket, David has played 10 times more T20s than list A games. His 214 appearances in T20 have reaped more than 4000 runs at a strike rate of 163, bumping that number to 165 across 37 internationals.

As Black Caps quick Lockie Ferguson explained, David spent years preparing for the type of death situation he encountered in Wellington, where he sent five of the final seven deliveries he faced to or over the fence.

“Tim’s very good and he plays a lot of T20 cricket, which I think helps his mindset in those scenarios,” Ferguson said. “He’s probably played them a lot more than other players and certainly that experience gives him a lot of confidence.

“He did the job [on Wednesday] so it’s back to the drawing board a little bit for us going into the weekend.”

That board in the Black Caps’ dressing room will have a line through the name of Southee – the test captain now focusing on that upcoming two-match series – and one underscoring Boult.

The 34-year-old Boult last wore a black cap at the ODI World Cup in November and his inclusion in this squad signalled he had been pencilled in for the T20 showpiece in June.

Having also racked up a double-century of T20 matches, taking 241 wickets at a strike rate of 19, Boult will likely be tasked with halting David’s late charge. The pair last year were teammates at MI New York, the inaugural Major League Cricket champions, but any insight Boult gleaned would be complicated by Eden Park’s dimensions.

On Australia’s last T20 visit to Auckland in 2018 they eased to victory in a tri-series final. Five days earlier, they scored 245-5 to chase down the Black Caps with seven balls to spare, as Boult took 1-42.

But Ferguson – the best of the Black Caps bowlers in Wellington with 1-23 – believed the left-arm veteran would provide the team a timely boost.

“He’s world-class,” Ferguson said. “Not only the bowling that he brings to the park but the conversations he has as a senior player.

“He’s been playing a huge amount of T20s, and in my books, I think he keeps getting better every time he comes back and joins the group. He was fantastic with us at the World Cup in India – and that experience, having that on the field, the guys feed off that.

“I thought the boys bowled really well as a whole [on Wednesday]. We had a lot of chances and it just didn’t quite fall our way.

“Australia played very well and got us on the last ball in a hell of a game of cricket. It sets up the weekend nicely.”

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission