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This all started at this same ground and against this same team. In June 2022, England were 93 for four, chasing 299 to win, and Ben Stokes told Jonny Bairstow to stop worrying and start hitting the ball for six. He did.

Four years, 48 Tests, 26 victories, and 301 sixes later, Stokes and his team are fighting to keep it from all ending here. They are 361 runs behind New Zealand with six wickets to take and one batting collapse away from a first defeat in a three-match home series since South Africa in 2012, a loss that cost Andrew Strauss his job as captain.

“What I say doesn’t really matter,” Stokes said at the beginning of the series. “What does matter is what happens on the field.” There’s been a lot of talking in the days before this game. He is right. What matters is how they play in the next four days. Watch them closely, we are about to find out if Stokes, and his side, still have it in them and whether this Test team has a future under the leadership of the managing director of England men’s cricket Rob Key, and the head coach, Brendon McCullum.

At the start of the day, McCullum pulled everyone into a huddle on the outfield. He spoke for a long time, then handed over to Stokes who made a joke that left everyone laughing. It was just about the last time anyone saw the players smiling until gone five o’clock, when they were on the far side of a record-breaking 317-run partnership between Tom Latham and Devon Conway.

It had been about as hard as Test cricket gets in this country. It was too hot to sit and watch cricket, let alone try to play it on a pitch like this, which offered all the sideways movement of a broken stairlift.

It was a thankless day to be a bowler. Chances were as precious as shade in the desert. England had one in the morning, another in the afternoon, a third in the evening. They blew the lot. There are days when you can get away with three mistakes, but in these conditions even one was too many.

The first was bad. At 11.25am, Stokes decided to switch third slip to second gully only for Latham to slice the next ball waist-high through the empty space where the fielder used to be.

The second was worse. At 2.45pm, Shoaib Bashir managed to beat Conway with a delivery that hit the pad a split-second before the bat. There was a half-hearted appeal, the umpire gave it not out and after talking it over the team decided against using a review on a decision replays soon revealed ought to have been given out lbw.

You wondered, then, if Stokes’s touch was failing him. He does not really do self-doubt, but watching all this, it felt like he was still feeling his way back into leading this team after letting them down in the past fortnight.

He seemed less sure of himself than usual. At his best, his instinct would have caused him to make a fielding change that won his team the wicket instead of making them to miss it. At his best, he would have had such conviction in his own opinion that he would have called for a review of the lbw decision he seemed to be keen on as he came walking in from his fielding position, instead of letting Bashir and Jamie Smith talk him out of it.

There was not much anyone could do on this pitch. But then, that has never stopped Stokes from trying. There were no canny bowling changes, no funky fields. He even made a couple of uncharacteristic misfields, one a particularly ugly one at mid-off when he stooped to pick up a ball and missed it altogether to give away a single.

When he was bowling, there was plenty of sweat, strain and effort, but he was muttering to himself as he walked back to his mark after each delivery, irritated his last ball had not been as good as he wanted it to be. He bowled well, but judging by the mood he was in, and what he felt the team needed from him, well was not enough.

Stokes was into his 13th over before he got the first wicket everyone had been waiting for. He smiled, in palpable relief. Three more came tumbling in a hurry after it, enough to know that whatever comes next, England not done just yet.