Zak Foulkes said that before play on Saturday New Zealand decided to attempt a new method of outfoxing England’s batters: by staying “as boring as possible”. If the process was deliberately dull, the results were electrifying. Having started their first innings on Friday by scoring 223 at 4.96 an over for the loss of just two wickets, the next day England completed it by scoring 131 at 3.02 an over, while losing eight. For the English it was, as Shoaib Bashir put it, “quite disappointing”.

“We just tried to stay as boring as possible really and try to dry out the runs,” said Foulkes. “Yesterday they got off to a fast start and we had to peg it back and peg it back, and we knew if we could dry it up, things could happen in our favour.”

Foulkes, who became New Zealand’s first ever concussion substitute in Test cricket when he replaced Blair Tickner on Friday, was key to the turnaround, taking three wickets including those of Harry Brook and Ben Stokes, both bowled by devilish deliveries which the bowler himself admitted owed a fair amount to luck. “I’m going to say they hit cracks, which is a good sign with us bowling last,” he said. “We just had to pry away on that top of off and hopefully the odd one would do something and we’d get our reward.

“I don’t think them doing that much is my doing really. I’m more of a swing bowler and there’s not a lot of swing out there, so I’ve bowled a lot of three-quarter balls. They just happened to move quite a bit – and I think there’s going to be quite a bit more of that during the next couple of days.”

Despite losing both openers early, New Zealand reached stumps on 120 for three, for a lead of 204 on a pitch that beyond the seam-assisting cracks is also starting to offer considerable assistance to spin, setting England up for a difficult task chasing a high total on a deteriorating surface. “I wouldn’t put a number on it, especially with this side. We’ve got unbelievable cricketers in this team,” said Bashir of the limits of the team’s target-chasing potential.

Foulkes was thrown into the fray on Friday after a Jofra Archer bouncer hit Tickner on the helmet late in New Zealand’s first innings. Tickner continued for a while, bowling three overs towards the start of England’s reply, before leaving the field complaining of dizziness.

“It was a very strange process,” Foulkes said. “As 12th man you still do your training in the morning, so I got through about seven overs at 8am, and then I was in the gym when we lost our last couple of wickets. It was a niggly one trying to switch on to actually be a part of the game. The process takes a while – the doctor has to do his tests and make sure there’s concussion and stuff like that, and then there’s paperwork to be done. So I went on the field, had to come off the field, Tom [Latham, the New Zealand captain] had to sign a few papers and then yeah, I was in the game.”