Matt Henry
Sippin' on henny
Pro cricketer, so he ain't on the benny
Fuck a boring eggs bene

With Trent Boult our injured, Matt Henry came into the Blackcaps Test bowling attack for the second Test against Pakistan. Doug Bracewell was plucked out of the Plunket Shield game between Central Districts and Northern DIstricts to take Henry's place in the wider squad as the shock-absorbers of a healthy Blackcaps Staple went to work.

Besides the call to drop Martin Guptill, or bring Guppy in to bat No.5...

Wait, allow me to offer an alternative Blackcaps Test team including Guppy and Guppy deserves to still be in the mix because he hit two centuries and a 50 in three innings upon returning to Auckland after the Indian tour.

Raval, Latham, Williamson, Taylor, Guptill, Watling, Santner, Henry, Southee, Wagner, Boult.

I like that team and in fitting with an overall theme of this digest, that we can come up with different teams, different blokes in different positions and what not, means that we have options. Options mean depth, depth is tremendous. That depth meant that besides people voicing their opinions about Guppy's place in the Test team, the noisiest opinions seem to centre around the inclusion of Henry in the bowling attack and/or giving Wagner a more prominent role in the bowling attack.

To an extent, this was thanks to the under-performing Boult and Tim Southee who have endured dips in their work this year. Boult and Southee weren't quite posing the same threat, while Henry and Wagner grabbed every chance with open arms. Boult and more notably, Southee have enjoyed their return to kiwi conditions and until they go through another lean patch, we can now look back on 2016 as not much more than a cheeky slump for these two.
Boult and Southee should still be known as the cornerstones of the Blackcaps bowling attack.

Usually when you take one of your top-tier bowlers out of a team, there's going to be some sort of impact, perhaps a drop in the new-ball threat or consistency of line and length when the ball gets older. In The Stable, the Blackcaps have been able to absorb the loss of Boult nicely with Henry slotting into the team to do a similar job to Boult, just with his right-arm and a little less swing.

Henry took the new-balls as Boult would and while he doesn't rely on swing as much as Boult does, he bangs the ball into the pitch to extract any movement off the pitch, always pegging away at a 5th-stump line. Henry is more similar to Wagner than Boult in Southee as he needs to hit the deck hard to get some assistance, while Boult and Southee tend to bowl along the pitch looking for some swing.

After 9 over on day two, Henry had conceded 13 runs (1.44rpo) and 7 of those runs came through the covers (/off-side in general). Any wise cricket judge will take runs scored through the covers off a new-ball bowler on the chin as it means that Henry has slipped up slightly in his length, or was a fraction too wide and when you're only conceding 1.44rpo, that's all good.

Southee took 3 wickets on day two, conceding 2.36rpo and 15 of the 26 runs he conceded came on the leg-side, while 11 came through the off-side. Southee was more expensive, yet he did the damage and you could argue that much of that was thanks to the combination of Southee and Henry as the built pressure as a unit; you ain't scoring runs off Henry so you feel tempted to play a shot against Southee.

Does that sound familiar? Southee and Boult are a top-shelf new-ball partnership and here the Blackcaps brought in Henry, who is doing the job of Boult very nicely.

While debating who should start for the Blackcaps is great, we should probably just be thankful that we have The Stable in general. Injuries and a loss of rhythm means that there's more rotation in the use of bowlers from game to game, series to series, this then means that it's less important to have three bowlers and more important to have four, five or six bowlers who can all do a job at a similar level.

Sure, everyone in The Stable will want to be on the park playing Test cricket, although they'd also probably be happy to play their role in a successful Blackcaps Test team.

Don't sleep on Henry's batting either. He hit 15 off 11 balls in the first innings, but on the Kiwi County Tour when Henry was playing for Worcestershire, Henry hit 180 runs in six innings with a highest score of 49* and an average of 45.

Henry's Test batting average of 23.12 and First-Class average of 23.40 are both better than Southee's (16.70 and 17.30).