Black Caps back experience
They may be playing a new brand of T20 in the IPL – but the Black Caps brains trust are banking on the tried and trusted for the WorldCup.
The 15-man New Zealand squad named yesterday for the 2024 T20 World Cup in June contains 12 players over the age of 28.
Quick bowler Ben Sears, 25, will travel as an injury replacement but missed making the major cut, as did hugely impressive pace bowling rookie Will O’Rourke, 22.
Instead, 32-year-old Matt Henry got the nod with Adam Milne ruled out with an ankle injury, while 35-year-old Tim Southee – the most prolific wicket-taker in T20 international history – is set to play in his seventh T20 World Cup.
Opener-wicketkeeper Tim Seifert missed selection for the tournament to be co-hosted by the West Indies and the United States, with selection manager Sam Wells and head coach Gary Stead optimistic Devon Conway will be fit to carry out that role. Thirteen of the squad were part of New Zealand’s three-match series in the West Indies in 2022, and Stead expects that familiarity with the conditions for their group games will be important.
New Zealand have been drawn in Group C, along with co-hosts the West Indies, Afghanistan, Uganda and Papua New Guinea.
The top two teams in each of the four groups will qualify for the Super Eight phase, where the teams will be split into two groups of four. The top two in each group will make the semifinals.
“When you go to World Cups, you want experience and you want people that know what it’s like,” Stead said.
“We expect the venues in the West Indies to offer quite varied conditions and feel we’ve selected a squad with the scope to adapt to those conditions.”
New Zealand’s spinners took 12 of the 17 West Indian wickets to fall in that 2022 series in Kingston won 2-1 by the visiting side, and this World Cup squad features orthodox left-armer slow bowlers Mitchell Santner and Rachin Ravindra, legspinner Ish Sodhi and offspinners Michael Bracewell and Glenn Phillips.
The pitches in the West Indies will be expected to mostly play slower – and with less bounce – than most international wickets, leading to lower-scoring encounters.
But this year’s IPL has seen an explosion in run-scoring – there have been 10 team scores of more than 240, as sides have attacked the bowling relentlessly from the outset. It’s happened while only Ravindra, Daryl Mitchell and Trent Boult have been playing regularly in the tournament among the nine members of the New Zealand squad with IPL franchises.
Stead feels the squad is capable of making big tallies when batting, but warned that the IPL has featured “very flat wickets, very small grounds”. “I wouldn't get completely carried away with what they are,” he said, suggesting that while there may be some high-scoring encounters, there could also be games where “140 could be a good score” in the West Indies.