New Zealand won both those matches. So the gamble didn’t cost them. The Canada game on Tuesday could offer further opportunities to put Phillips and Ravindra in the firing line so that if they’re needed later on in the tournament, they’ll have some recent experience behind them.
“Obviously, Beast [Bracewell] is a big loss for us with his power and obviously his bowling as well,” Phillips said. “But we do have the stocks with both Ish [Sodhi], Rach, and obviously myself to be able to make up overs, especially in this part of the world.
“We both love our bowling. And we love being given the opportunity to contribute in both facets of the game. But having Neesh [James Neesham] there as well provides the opportunity to be able to make up that fifth bowler with both seam and spin which is quite handy.”
Provided they go through to the Super Eights, New Zealand will be playing all three of their games in Colombo where spin does seem to be in use a fair bit.
“The conditions in Sri Lanka are going to be very different to the ones that we’ve got here,” Phillips said. “It poses a completely different challenge. And I guess there’s no one thing in cricket that’s a magic nugget to be able to give performances, so it’s just about trying to be a little bit better and doing our things that we do best for longer periods of time, especially if the conditions dictate that we’re going to have to take a game a little bit longer.
“Maybe scores of 160-150 might be different in Sri Lanka with a bit more turn, but you never know. We may get an absolute belter and then 200 is still on.”
New Zealand’s team combination does place a lot of stress on their big players, including Phillips for quick runs, their new-ball bowlers for early wickets and their captain for keeping things tight. In the bilateral series against India, and in the last game against South Africa, the wheels occasionally came off.
“There’s not necessarily been a pattern per se [to NZ’s defeats],” Phillips said. “If our top order’s gone down, then our middle order stepped up. And, sometimes it just happens to be the way that the top order gets off to a start and then the middle can’t go through. So that’s just the nature of T20 cricket when you’re trying to keep the momentum going the whole time. But if you look at the options the boys took, they’re in really clear mindsets. Obviously, it just comes down to execution at the end of the day.
“And then with the ball as well, we’re just trying to make sure that we’re hitting our straps as much as possible. And guys are allowed to hit your good balls and then if we didn’t bowl as well as we have on previous days, then we look at that and we go, we can be better on the next day and that’s fine.”
“It has to be pretty far to not, I guess, put in any effort. There are certainly parts of the game that if the team needs a little bit of an energy boost, whether I’m going to get there or not, it might not matter, and I’ll put in the dive in anyway”
Glenn Phillips on his boundary-saving efforts
There is one non-negotiable though. Phillips demonstrated it against UAE when he ran full tilt along the leg-side boundary and threw himself head first to limit Waseem’s sweep shot to just two runs instead of four. How far does the ball need to be for him to say, ‘yeah okay, I’m not getting that’?
“It has to be pretty far to not, I guess, put in any effort,” he said. “There are certainly parts of the game that, I guess, if the team needs a little bit of an energy boost, whether I’m going to get there or not, it might not matter, and I’ll put in the dive in anyway. And that’s just something that I can do to try and give back and give a bit of energy to the guys.
“But sometimes there is a point in time where you need to just understand it is a little bit out of reach. And if you’re not going to get it, sometimes there’s a little bit of a cautiousness needed to be taken, considering there’s a long tournament to go. But if there’s any inkling that I might even have a chance to throw myself full tilt, [I will].”
Alagappan Muthu is a sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo