Future battles

An analysis of the stats from the recent New Zealand-England series highlights some battles to watch out for in May's return fixture.

Here are a few struggles to watch out for:

1) Ross Taylor against Monty Panesar. Taylor coped with Sidebottom better than any other player (averaging 88 against him), but Monty seemed to trouble him - the tyro only scored 41 runs off 139 balls from the spinner, and was out to him twice.

2) Jacob Oram against Ryan Sidebottom. Jake faced 51 balls from the Oxymoron in the series. In that time he only made 19 runs and was dismissed three times. Oram needs to do much better than that if he is going to be picked as a batsman in the top six.

3) Kyle Mills against the England top three. Between them Vaughan, Cook and Strauss faced 246 balls from Mills. In those balls they only managed 94 runs at an average of 15.67.