Gotta keep it 3,000 percent real and say that the seam bowling in Ford Trophy hasn't quite been as funky as I'd like after two rounds, other than a few exceptions. Otago seamer Jack Hunter's funk has emerged as the best seamer thus far, which could be viewed as an example of what we've been dealing with in terms of seam bowling.

That's super rough on young Jack though and he does have some interesting stuff, so I'll make a few different notes to hammer home this point. As highlighted in the first round two thingy, Wellington's Hamish Bennett and Logan van Beek have been non-factors in the first two rounds and even Northern Districts' Scott Kuggeleijn aka Mr Wickets has struggled; all three average over 40 after two games.

My favourite seamer Doug Bracewell's yet to take a wicket in 18 overs and his slick Central Districts comrade Ben Wheeler has been solid (3w @ 31.33avg/5.73rpo) without quite being near his best, heck even Ben Stokes hasn't taken a wicket yet. There are guys like Hunter who have done the trick in the first two games (Jacob Duffy, Mitchell McClenaghan, Blair Tickner) but I just can't shake the feeling that we're a bit light in high-performing seamers at the moment.

This is nothing to be concerned about, just a weird feeling. Although a cluster of Aotearoa's best seamers haven't done much in Ford Trophy so far, we've also only had Lockie Ferguson play one game and at the moment you can kinda put a line through an entire Canterbury seam bowling group as they are deep into their depth chart without the likes of Ed Nuttall, Kyle Jamieson and Henry Shipley. Low key; don't go nuts about batsmen scoring plenty of runs in games vs Canterbury.

Wellington's best seamers are under-performing, ND's best seamer is under-performing, two of CD's best are under-performing, Cantebury don't have a notable seam attack, while we haven't seen much of Ferguson and outside of one hot game for McClenaghan, Auckland's seamers haven't done anything. That combined with the plethora of spinners and tweakers who have made decent starts has me wondering about which seamers will take the FT by the throat and demand attention as the gun seamer.

The single most intriguing geezer in that regard is CD's Adam Milne, who popped back into domestic cricket and took an impressive 3w in 8ov @ 4.37rpo. A portion of my intrigue around Milne is because we probably won't see him play the entire FT campaign as he's likely to be on Blackcaps ODI/T20 duty soon, so we'll have a brief glimpse at what Milne can do as perhaps the best seamer in the FT.

Another portion of my intrigue stems from me being kinda critical of Milne's swift rise to the Blackcaps, especially for the Champions Trophy. Milne was selected for CT largely because he was healthy and not because he was dominating domestic cricket - he did next to nothing in five Plunket Shield games before being selected - and Milne is now viewed as the automatic third-seamer along with Tim Southee and Trent Boult in ODI cricket. With that context in mind, Milne has a genuine opportunity to dominate FT and stamp his authority on domestic cricket in whatever number of games he plays.

The Milne vs Ferguson narrative is funky on a few levels and Ferguson only took 1w in his FT game, yet he conceded just 3rpo off his 10ov. We've seen Ferguson consistently dominate domestic cricket though, whereas Milne has consistently battled injury and while the battle between the two is interesting, I'm more zoned in on what Milne does in the next few comes given that he's healthy and FT is there for the taking.

Then you've got the fact that Ferguson and Milne have similar stuff. Plebs will note that they both bowl fast, yet that's only half the story as they also both have a natural way of angling the ball into right-handers. This is what has made facing Ferguson such a nightmare as domestic batsmen rarely face that level of pace, let alone heat that is sparing in at you and not whistling past your outside edge. Milne doesn't quite get the same level of movement, he's definitely angling the ball back at right-handers though and as Milne is taller than Ferguson, he's angling it back into righties with more bounce and whip.

Milne's 3 wickets vs ND included trapping Dean Brownlie lbw and having Nick Kelly caught-behind, sending two of ND's top-three batsmen back to the sheds.

Here's Brownlie's lbw and you can follow the ball, angling into Brownlie with the angle and pace causing Brownlie to miss the ball:

Look at far left and there's only one way the ball can angle from there.

To a lefty, Milne is moving the ball away and this movement away from Kelly results in Kelly getting stuck in weird spot and and an outside edge:

In both dismissals, you can see that at the point of delivery everything is aligned to push the ball into a righty. Just before the point of delivery, Milne bowls from a front-on position where his hips are reasonably square to the batsmen in the far left and then in the far right shot he is looking down the inside of his front arm:

This results in movement into right-handers, although Milne isn't as front-on as Ferguson and as such he doesn't get the hooping in-swing that Ferguson gets. Milne has what they'd call a mixed action, but at key points of his delivery, he's front-on which gets his natural movement and at his pace, any natural movement or angle is hugely beneficial.

A best seamer in FT nod is there for the taking if Milne is able to stack up multiple games in which he takes 2+ wickets and is difficult to score off. There's a lack of top-performing upper echelon seamers at the moment and Ferguson has laid down his claim to the title by bowling 2 maidens and conceding just 3rpo. Milne flexed with wickets and Ferguson will explode with wickets at some stage, so how Milne fights of Ferguson will be a huge yarn to keep tabs on in the coming games.

I am very interested to see if Jack Hunter can maintain his impressive start to the FT and the same goes for Auckland leggy Tarun Nethula. I talked about Nethula after round one and he has been in this position before, so he knows how to work his way through a FT campaign as an upper echelon spinner. Nethula backed up 4w in game one with 3w in game two and big wickets as well; Michael Pollard caught-behind after Pollard faced 44 balls, Ben Stokes lbw after Stokes had faced 41 balls and Todd Astle caught after he'd hit 53 off 49 balls.

In all three instances, Auckland needed a wicket to stem the flow of runs and Nethula delivered the goods. Without those wickets, Canterbury likely score over 300.

Hunter on the other hand is fresh and I don't know too much about him, hence I'll refrain from going too deep into some analysis until he does this for a few more rounds. If Hunter is still in the top-five wicket-takers after five games, then he'll be dripping with funk for me to write about. If he and Jacob Duffy are both in the top-five wicket-takers (Hunter's #2 now, Duffy #3) after five games, then Otago will be winning games given their spinners and batting talent.

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Peace and love 27.