Ben Stokes feels "blessed" to be working with such a strong bowling unit as England wrapped up a 267-run rout of New Zealand in the first Test in Mount Maunganui.
After Stuart Broad's mesmerising Saturday spell, in which he removed four of the Black Caps' top order, James Anderson swept up the tail as England finished an impressive job within one session at Bay Oval on Sunday.
During the match, Anderson and Broad – first and second on England's all-time list of Test wicket-takers – became the most successful partnership in the history of five-day cricket, tallying 1,009 combined by the end of the match to surpass the previous best of 1,001 achieved by Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne.
With Ollie Robinson also in England's best XI, and Mark Wood, Olly Stone, Matthew Potts, Jofra Archer, Saqib Mahmood and Chris Woakes among those knocking on the door, captain Stokes is blessed with options ahead of the Ashes versus Australia later this year.
Speaking to Sky Sports, he said: "It was another great performance – very clinical with the bat and very clinical with the ball.
"When you look at the bowling attack we have got with the pink ball under the lights, we executed everything we wanted. To have Jimmy and Broady in your bowling attack, it is always going to be tough for the opposition.
"The most pleasing thing was that whatever New Zealand threw at us with the ball, we managed to react to that. It was entertaining cricket. Even though we came away with the result, [entertaining] is what we want to do. Some days it is not going to work, but thankfully everything we tried to do paid off.
"I am pretty blessed to be in charge of this bowling group at the moment. The idea is to take 10 wickets and that is what we are trying to do – taking the scoreboard away in any situation.
"As long as we are taking 10 wickets, it doesn't really matter how many runs we go for. We have an ethos with the bat but also with the ball."
England have racked up six straight Test wins as the Stokes-Brendon McCullum revolution continues at a pace.
This represented a 10th win from 12 Tests as captain, the joint-fastest a skipper has reached the milestone.
"There are 10 other people who have to go out there and do a job," Stokes added to BBC Sport. "I'm very lucky to be able to captain this team at the moment.
"When you look at captaincy records, it's only a small part of it.
"It's not only my captaincy and ideas that are allowing us to play this way, you also have to have the players fully behind you, to follow you out there with what you want to do.
"I've got off to a great start with my captaincy, but most of that has got to go down to the players."
New Zealand captain Tim Southee felt his team created plenty of opportunities for wickets but did not do enough to stop England when they were in full attack mode.
"It is disappointing, but credit to England, strategically they played it pretty well. We were on the receiving end of a couple of night periods that obviously weren't ideal," Southee told Sky Sports.
"The style they play is going to present opportunities, and we saw that in the first innings. We got nine wickets in the end, and in the second innings we got all 10 – but it's about stopping the bleeding in between."
England’s Nat Sciver-Brunt named Wisden’s leading women’s cricketer in the world
Nat Sciver-Brunt has become the first English woman to be honoured as Wisden’s leading cricketer in the world, heading an awards list that also includes Harry Brook and Mark Wood among the almanack’s five cricketers of the year.
Sciver-Brunt takes top billing in the women’s game following an outstanding run of form in 2023, with Australia captain Pat Cummins picking up the men’s trophy having led his country to success in both the World Test Championship and 50-over World Cup. He succeeds Ben Stokes, who has landed the prestigious title three times in the last four years.
Sciver-Brunt’s star power was acknowledged by Mumbai Indians at the start of the year, when her £320,000 Women’s Premier League deal made her the United Kingdom’s highest-paid female team athlete and her worth only rose as the calendar unfolded.
She hit three ODI centuries in five innings, including two Ashes tons in the space of 72 hours as England came from 6-0 down to draw the marquee series 8-8.
Sciver-Brunt also thrashed a 66-ball hundred against Sri Lanka, a new English record, having previously been named player of the final and second top run-scorer in the WPL to justify her huge price tag.
In earning Wisden’s nod, Sciver-Brunt finally places an English name on the women’s gong, which has been won five times by Australians in the 10 years since its inception.
There was also a distinct Ashes flavour to the historic cricketers of the year panel, the coveted once-in-a-career award dating back to 1889 and focused on performances during the preceding English summer.
Brook appears on the back of scoring 363 runs at a shade over 40 in his maiden series against the Australians, capped by a fourth-innings turn of 75 in the pressure of a must-win home Test at Headingley. The Yorkshireman also won a place in both limited-overs teams and hit the only men’s century in the third edition of The Hundred.
“Harry Brook passed 50 four times during the Ashes – more times than anyone – and played crucial hands in England’s wins at Headingley and The Oval,” noted Wisden editor Lawrence Booth.
“He smashed a record 41-ball century for Northern Superchargers, then forced his way into England’s World Cup squad with some breath-taking innings against New Zealand.”
Wood, almost a decade older than Brook at 34 and perhaps running out of chances to make the cut, is honoured for a transformative impact on the Ashes contest. Entering the contest with England 2-0 down, his raw pace helped lift the hosts off the mat in Leeds and he finished with 14 wickets at 20.21 in three undefeated outings against the old enemy.
“The selection of Mark Wood for the Third Test at Headingley turned the Ashes on its head,” Booth concluded.
“He topped 96mph, took five for 34, and pushed Australia on the back foot, literally and figuratively.”
That England did not regain the urn with an outright win owed much to the efforts Usman Khawaja and Mitchell Starc. They finished a thrilling series as top run-scorer with 496 and top-wicket-taker with 23, respectively, and also take their places in the cricketer of the year lineage.
Compatriot Ashleigh Gardner joins them, with a 12-wicket haul in the standalone women’s Ashes Test proving a pivotal contribution.
Yet another Australian will take custody of the Wisden Trophy for Test performance of the year, Travis Head winning out for his decisive 163 in the WTC final against India at The Oval.
West Indian Hayley Matthews becomes the first woman to be named leading T20 cricketer of the year after seven years.
The numbers which prove Derek Underwood had plenty of players in a spin
Derek Underwood, one of Test and first-class cricket’s all-time leading wicket-takers, has died aged 78.
Underwood, who retired in 1987 and played his last Test in 1982, still ranks sixth among Test wicket-takers for England and is the leading spinner on that list.
He also ranks 14th all-time for first-class wickets and here, the PA news agency looks at his career record.
First-class recordUnderwood took 2,465 first-class wickets in a 25-year career with Kent and England spanning 676 matches.
That ranks him comfortably inside the top 20 in the game’s history, while his wickets came at an average of 20.28.
While that excellent mark is actually bettered by most of those ahead of him, on a list headed by fellow slow left-armer Wilfred Rhodes’ 4,204 wickets at 16.72, Underwood’s economy rate of 2.14 runs an over is the best of the many spinners in that group and trails only Derek Shackleton and Maurice Tate.
He took 100 wickets in his debut first-class season in 1963 – becoming the youngest bowler to do so, only turning 18 in June of that summer.
Nicknamed “Deadly”, he had career-best figures of nine for 28 and was noted for his match-winning spells – particularly on damp pitches, such as his seven for 50 in a 1968 Test against Australia at the Oval and eight for nine against Sussex five years later.
Though not noted for his batting, he recorded a solitary first-class century in 1984, aged 39. Sussex were again the opponents as he nudged his way to 111 in a tied game. He added just two half-centuries in 710 innings.
A further 411 matches in List A cricket, with 572 wickets at 19.40, took him beyond 1,000 matches and 3,000 wickets in his career.
England recordNo other England spinner has taken as many Test wickets as Underwood’s 297, in 86 games between 1966 and 1982.
His wickets came at an average of 25.84, with his best innings and match figures both coming against Pakistan in August 1974 with eight for 51 in the second innings and 13 for 71 in the match.
James Anderson and Stuart Broad have broken new frontiers for England in recent years, with 700 and 604 wickets respectively, but only three other bowlers have exceeded Underwood’s tally.
Lord Ian Botham took 383 between 1977 and 1992, Bob Willis took 325 and Fred Trueman 307.
Graeme Swann is Underwood’s nearest challenger among England spinners, taking his 255 wickets in just 60 matches but at an average over four runs higher than Underwood’s.
Underwood ranks 38th on the all-time Test wicket list and is in the top 10 among spinners, a list headed by Sri Lanka great Muttiah Muralitharan’s record 800 and Shane Warne’s 708 for Australia.
Anil Kumble took 619 for India, Australia’s Nathan Lyon and India’s Ravichandran Ashwin are over 500 and Rangana Herath and Harbhajan Singh broke the 400 barrier. Daniel Vettori (362) and Lance Gibbs (309) are the others ahead of Underwood.
On the spinning pitches of India, Underwood edges out Australia’s Richie Benaud as the leading visiting spinner with 54 wickets.
Underwood also played 26 one-day internationals, taking 32 wickets at 22.93 with a best of four for 44 against the West Indies.
‘Deadly’ Derek Underwood – the spinner who caused havoc with unique skill set
More than 40 years have passed since his last Test appearance, but among English spinners the achievements of ‘Deadly’ Derek Underwood stand alone as the benchmark.
Underwood, who has died aged 78, remains the country’s most prolific, successful and revered spin bowler of his or any other period, claiming an unmatched career haul of 297 wickets.
His ubiquitous nickname was uttered affectionately by those who played alongside him and fearfully by those he came up against, a recognition of his ability to wreak havoc with his unique set of skills.
Quicker and flatter than the average slow left-armer – the first word of that descriptor always seemed out of place – he was renowned as a master manipulator of damp surfaces in the eras of uncovered pitches.
That puts him comfortably clear at the top of the England lineage – 42 ahead of the next best, Graeme Swann, and streets beyond significant figures like Tony Lock (174), Jim Laker (193) and Moeen Ali (204).
While Underwood’s record tally was undoubtedly aided by the ‘sticky dog’ conditions which later disappeared from the game, he was several decades too early to cash in on the goldmine of DRS.
While Swann won 70 lbw decisions with technology on his side, Underwood earned just 24 in a time when batters could confidently use their pad as a first line of defence.
His impressive final haul, and the legacy that goes with it, would have been even more striking were it not for two self-imposed interruptions to his international career, first for joining Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket and later for his role in the first ‘rebel tour’ of South Africa.
The International Cricket Council’s official rankings, applied retrospectively, now places Underwood as the world’s number one Test bowler for almost four years between 1969-1973.
Among many highs, including 17 five-wicket hauls and six 10-wicket matches, he is most fondly remembered for a starring role in a classic Ashes finish at the Oval in 1968.
With a downpour threatening to preserve Australia’s 2-1 series lead, members of the crowd helped with the mopping up work to allow Colin Cowdrey’s side little more than half-an-hour to take the six wickets they needed for victory.
All eyes were on Underwood, who exploited a made-to-measure surface with a sequence of four wickets for six runs in 27 balls, wrapping things up with barely five minutes to spare and finishing with seven for 50.
In similar circumstances against Sussex five years later, he proved positively unplayable as he gorged himself with cartoonish figures of eight for nine.
Born on June 8 1945 in Bromley to a cricketing family, his aptitude revealed itself early at Dulwich College Preparatory School when he took nine wickets in an innings for the under-10s.
He went one better by claiming all 10 in an outing for Beckenham and Penge Grammar School and was later spotted by Lock, who passed an excited recommendation on to Kent.
After making his first-class debut for them at just 17, taking 101 wickets in each of his first two seasons, he progressed to the Test arena by the tender age of 21.
A year later Alan Knott, a long-time accomplice from schoolboy cricket to the Kent first XI, followed him and one of England’s defining bowler-wicketkeeper partnerships took root.
Mark Nicholas, broadcaster and former Hampshire captain, once described batting against the pair as being “piggy-in-the-middle of a collaboration in genius”.
Underwood proved himself a reliable matchwinner when the elements assisted – it was said England carried him like an umbrella, for he was indispensable when it rained – and relentlessly miserly when they did not.
That combination had already yielded 265 Test scalps in 74 caps when he was lured away by the Packer revolution in 1977, a decision that brought overdue financial security and no real regrets.
He was welcomed back for a lower-key second act, making 12 more appearances and signing off with eight wickets in Sri Lanka’s inaugural Test, before bringing down the curtain for good by joining the controversial trip to Apartheid-era South Africa in 1982.
Underwood continued to turn out for Kent for several seasons and finished up a three-time County Championship winner, including the 1970 title which ended a 57-year wait.
Having reached 1,000 first-class wickets as a 25-year-old – only Wilfred Rhodes and George Lohmann had ever completed the feat quicker – he finally added a century to his list of achievements at the age of 39.
For a batter best known for belligerent efforts as a nightwatchman, it was a proud late addition to an already-glittering CV.
Husband to Dawn and father to two daughters, Heather and Fiona, he was appointed president of the MCC in 2008 and an honorary fellow of Canterbury Christ Church University in later life.
A relatively low-profile retirement followed, belying his status as a fixture in any conversation about an all-time England XI.
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