Mumbai v New Zealanders, Tour Match, Day 1, Review: Latham and Williamson hit fifties before NZ declare

The New Zealanders kicked off their preparations for Test series against India with a pretty satisfying display of batting on day one of the first tour match against Mumbai at the Feroz Shah Kotla ground, Delhi.

Batting first, the Kiwis declared their innings after making 324/7d after playing for 75 overs. Fabulous half- centuries from skipper Kane Williamson and opener Tom Latham were the highlight of the day.

The start of the day was bit surprising for the New Zealanders. Expecting a spinning track, they decided to give all their three spinners – Mark Craig, Mitchell Santner and Ish Sodhi a chance to play. However, the Black Caps were totally taken aback after seeing a green track on offer.

However, there wasn’t a huge disappointment over this fact and they played down this factor. The Kiwis had not played any tour game in their previous two tours and skipper Williamson mentioned that was good to get some practice game to soak in the atmosphere.

They started off steadily with Guptill and Latham looking solid. But, the Balwinder Sandhu Jr, made a quick impact as he snapped the wicket of Guptill in the 7th over of the day.

However, there was no other immediate success for the Ranji champions as Williamson and Latham combined to put together 85 for the 2nd wicket before Sandhu struck again with the wicket of Williamson. Taylor then joined Latham but both could not bat together for long as the latter chose to retire and walk back to the pavilion at the score of 55.

The middle order and the lower middle order comprising of Henry Nicholls (29), BJ Watling (45 retd.) and Mitchell Santner (45) all gathered runs and gained batting practice while Mark Craig (33*) and Ish Sodhi (29) returned unbeaten when Williamson decided to declare the innings to give his bowlers a chance to have a go at the Mumbai batsmen in the last session with the new ball.

The Mumbai bowlers went through a real grind today and skipper Aditya Tare used 9 bowlers in the first innings.

Coming out to bat in the second innings, left armer Trent Boult made a quick impact taking the wicket of opener Jay Bista in the first over itself. However, the Kiwis did not get any further success as the young Arman Jaffer and Kaustub Pawar batted out the remaining overs of the day cautiously and returned to the pavilion unbeaten on 24 & 5 runs respectively.

Brief Scores:

New Zealanders: 324/7d (Tom Latham 55; B Sandhu 2/21)

Mumbai: 29/1 (A Jaffer 24; T Boult 1/5)