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

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.

Assuming, that is, that it was really him and not a dummy he had rigged up out of bits of discarded kit to buy a little more time for his getaway. He has been pretty inscrutable so far, while he has been sizing up the job he has taken on. You guess that it feels a lot bigger to him now than it did this time last week.

McCullum did come back later in the day, although he seemed to slump lower and lower in his seat until you could barely see his head above the railings.

Maybe he was sending a discreet text to his agent to double check whether there was any mention of a cooling-off period in the small print of the four-year contract Rob Key talked him into signing with the England and Wales Cricket Board.

Early on the first morning, Sky ran a graphic showing how each of their last four head