A hundred for Root after a poor start leaves England not badly set. But five catches for McCullum as stand-in wicket-keeper is worth a ripple of applause.
…And New Zealand getting taken to the cleaners again, all out for half England’s score despite an amazing slogfest from the last pair (putting on fifty at two runs per ball! 
). Only question is whether England send 'em in again or decide to bat - there’s plenty of time left and NZ didn’t last two whole sessions.
ENgland didn’t enforce the follow-on (as seems to be the norm these days) and now have a lead of almost 300 with 9 wickets in hand and two days left to play. New Zealand were competitve for the first three days of the First Test, but since then have been comprehensively outplayed by England.
Not sure what the weather is due to be like, although forecasts haven’t been optimistic. Still, there’s 2 days left, and even if England declared now NZ would struggle to get the runs. I suspect Eng will want at least another hundred though.
It’s all down to the weather now. Swan bowling Taylor just before the close of play was the big breakthrough. I don’t think NZ had much hope anyway, but with him and McCullum at the crease there’s always a chance of a big partnership.
Four wickets left, if there’s so much as half a day’s play tomorrow you’ve got to figure the game’s in the bag.
Yup.
Once play started, NZ lost their wickets at a fairly steady clip - but that’s hardly surprising because if conditions are only just good enough to play (and it was apparently raining softly through much of the last session) then they’re going to be pretty horrible for tail-enders to bat in. Swann was in his element (32-12-90-6), of course.
Praying for rain is a fairly woeful place to find yourself in; is it unfair to suggest that England were in the reverse position? It wouldn’t have taken much more of a downpour to get NZ the draw, so were they lucky or is Cook’s meteorological judgement just that good? At the point where they’ve won it’s churlish to complain of course, but you suspect there could have been a result last night.
Anyhow, a fairly comprehensive series win in the end
I think their point about not assuming that today will be washed out was that it’s actually quite rare these days for entire days to be washed out without play - drainage and groundskeeping has improved such that they can get the covers off and get play started really very quickly these days, so there was always a decent chance of a fair amount of play today.
Personally, as an England fan, I can forgive batting again, but I think that batting for as long as they did was, really, poor tactics. I’d have been happier to get them in for an hour before lunch yesterday, having tried to up the scoring rate on the evening before. Although, as Trott himself pointed out, it’s easy to say that from here.
I’m going to the one-day match on Sunday at the Ageas Bowl. Let’s hope we get some decent weather.
Going there myself, actually. The weather is supposed to improve as the week goes on.
What a day! I was sat next to a group of 10 or so Kiwis who drank beer and sang songs throughout the game. It was by far the loudest part of the ground as far as I could tell. Highly entertaining and made for a great Birthday. The result was disappointing but we had fun.