New Zealand make hay as England suffer from winning good toss to lose

There is a shamanistic mystery to the reading of a wicket. Many experienced players concede it is something they just aren’t good at, a mystical skill that never settled upon them, vaguely akin to the interpretation of tea leaves and the conjuring of visions from crystal balls. And Trent Bridge had produced a real puzzle.

The groundsman, knowing more about this wicket than most, warned before play that this would be a good toss to lose. With grass on the pitch and clouds in the sky the obvious decision was to bowl – which is what Ben Stokes duly did – but there was no devilry there at all. England’s new-look leadership turned out to be all motivation and no divination.

“I think the toss is a really interesting thing in cricket – you make a decision but you shouldn’t expect things to happen, it’s just what you hope might happen,” Jon Lewis, the England bowling coach, said. “The most important thing was it was aggressive play: we were coming out to try and bowl New Zealand out. And I thought there was threat all day. I thought we could have easily bowled them out for 250 and we’d be in a very different position.”

A position different mainly by being completely untethered to reality, for all the chances England went on to miss. But Stokes’ decision was consistent with his very public intention to explore the wildest extremes of positivity.

Bowling always seems the more positive choice, while batting is necessarily reactive. Throw in the poor form of some members of New Zealand’s top order, the absence of the self-isolating Kane Williamson and Henry Nicholls batting for the first time on the tour and bowling seemed a good idea whatever the state of the pitch.

For the Kiwis it proved, yes, a good toss to lose. “If we’d won