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Luke Ronchi, the head coach of New Zealand, emphasised
the influence of Saqlian Mushtaq, the coach of spin bowling, especially his
familiarity with the environment in Bangladesh, where they will play two Test
matches beginning on November 28. Earlier this year, Mushtaq travelled to
Pakistan with the New Zealand white-ball team in the similar role.
For this tour of Bangladesh, New Zealand has five spin
options available to them: Ish Sodhi, Ajaz Patel, Mitchell Santner, Rachin
Ravindra, and Glenn Phillips. This is four more than they had on their previous
tour in 2013.
“I mean his (Saqlain) knowledge of these parts of
the world is fantastic and the way he can talk with our spinners and sort of
coach them in different areas with, I guess, the trajectory, lines, lengths,
and different things like reading a wicket as well, sort of how it might play.
It’s fantastic,” Ronchi said.”And I guess he played a lot of
international cricket. He’s been around for a long, long time. To use his
knowledge is very big thing for us,” he concluded.
“I think that’s the nature of cricket in
Bangladesh, isn’t it? There’s a lot more spinners involved,” Rochi opined.
“I think, with the trainings we’ve had and sort of the way the surfaces
have played there, we’re expecting a bit more up and down, a bit more turn. So,
we’ll see how it goes, see how it plays out,” he said.
Despite their abundance of spin, a major test may come
from how well they handle spin as hitters. According to Ronchi, the reverse
sweep is a shot that batters all over the world have been using a lot more
recently to counter turn, therefore New Zealand batsmen will have to come up
with unique strategies to overcome the difficulty.
“I think around the world now you see reverse
sweeping coming into it a heck load more now which does make it more
challenging for bowlers. But again, that’s how guys are going to play it. They
need to work out the surface and adapt to that surface in whichever way they
think is going to help them the best to score the runs they can score,”
Ronchi said.
“But again, we play a lot of cricket in the
subcontinent, we’ve played everywhere now that we’ve toured in Pakistan as
well, so, the guys have their own tactics and how they play,” he said.
“For the majority of our group here, they have
been in India, they’ve been at the World Cups, and they’ve been practicing on
different surfaces, slower and turning sort of surfaces. So that hopefully
helps us for this Test series,” he said.