New Zealand opener who spent years on fringes of the game now has the highest score by a Test debutant in England
Devon Conway was out in the middle for a quarter of an hour before he actually did any batting on Wednesday morning. His partner, Tom Latham, took one single off the last ball of the first over, another off the last ball of the second, and faced all of the third himself, so the game was into its fourth over before Conway finally got to face his first ball. Eight hours (and 136 runs) later Conway said that he’d been happy to have the extra time, that it had allowed him to watch the bowlers at work and learn a little more about what he was up against. What’s another 15 minutes, after all, to a man who’s waited almost 15 years?
Conway made his first class debut for Gauteng back in March 2009, when he was a 17-year-old kid who was still batting No 3 for his school St John’s College. In the years since, he’s played for at least 21 different teams in three different countries, had spells in franchise and provincial
Cricket in
South Africa, done stretches in the Lancashire League, the East Anglian League, the West of
England League, and the Northern
Premier League, taken two turns in Somerset’s second XI, and worked his way up from club cricket through to first-class cricket and then into the international set-up in
New Zealand.