Stuart Broad and Jimmy Anderson toil but fielders test bowlers’ patience | Andy Bull


For the new England Test coach Brendon McCullum, the job will be feeling a lot bigger now than it did this time last week

Some time in the middle of the afternoon Brendon McCullum quit his position on the balcony, where he had been sitting all through the morning, and disappeared back into the pavilion. He was gone for an hour or so, long enough that you started to wonder if he had clocked that he still had time to make the quarter-to-nine flight from London Heathrow which, with a couple of changes in Dubai and Melbourne, could have had him back in New Zealand by three o’clock Monday morning. Given the way the game was going at the time, he might have fancied his chances of making it back to catch the end of New Zealand’s first innings.

You can only guess what McCullum was thinking behind his sunglasses, the view from his house back in Bay of Plenty, perhaps, his cushy gig making travel shows for Netflix and coaching in the IPL, his stable of race horses, and speculate whether or not there was a touch of remorse about his decision to buy into this project.

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