A businesslike performance from England allowed them to win the final T20 in Wellington by 5 wickets, with 7 balls to spare, to close out the series 4-1.

With Lauren Bell sitting this one out, England’s one change was to bring back Lauren Filer for her second outing of the series. It was a “like for like” replacement, in the sense that they are both “fast bowlers” but Filer’s plans today were not plans you’d have given Bell.

Filer’s directives today were straight out of men’s county cricket, where her coach and mentor Jon Lewis plied his trade for nearly 20 years – rough up the Kiwis by bowling short and targeting the body. You don’t see these kinds of tactic much in the women’s game, I think partly because the women’s game is just less aggressive, and partly because you need to be bowling pretty rapidly for it to work. Indeed, I have an inkling that if you asked England directly whether this was the tactic they’d probably deny it, but the evidence is clear to see – almost every delivery was missing the stumps but hitting the batter, forcing them to fend-off in a way that they aren’t comfortable or accustomed to doing.

And it worked – there might not have been any reward in the wickets column on this occasion, but Filer bowled 12 dots and finished with England’s best Economy Rate on the day, going at just 5.5 per over. The prospect of Filer bowling with these plans in next year’s Women’s Ashes Test at the MCG, with close fielders to pile the pressure on the batters, is… intriguing, shall we say?

With Filer and Nat Sciver-Brunt bowling most of the powerplay, New Zealand struggled. NSB produced a beauty to get Bernadine Bezuidenhout in her first over; and then had Amelia Kerr caught in the deep in her second. In fact, Kerr’s wicket might say “c Capsey b Sciver-Brunt” in the scorebook, but it should really read “c Capsey b Filer” because it was undoubtedly the 5 dots bowled by Filer to Kerr in the previous over that induced an uncharacteristically adventurous shot from Kerr, who is not a power hitter and is normally smart enough to know that – she had one of the lowest boundary percentage of any of the top 20 batters in WPL.

New Zealand finished the powerplay 29-3 – the lowest powerplay score of the series. Alex Hartley observed on comms that the team that has “won” the powerplay has gone on to lose the match in every prior game in this series; but I think that is more an artefact of the way New Zealand’s top-heavy batting tends to mean they hare-off at 90mph before falling away later. So credit to them, because that’s not what happened today.

A 28-ball 51 from Izzy Gaze was the key innings, allowing New Zealand to plunder 41 runs at the death. It was all a bit madcap, but it took them to a score of 136, which is bang-on average for a T20 international between the championship sides these days – so definitely a score where you’re in the game.

With Maia Bouchier barely troubling the scorers for once, England too got off to a slow start. Neither Alice Capsey nor Danni Wyatt really got going, and were eventually dismissed for similar returns trying to accelerate their scoring: Wyatt stumped coming down the wicket and Capsey… you’re not going to believe this… caught in the outfield trying to smash it ten ways to Timbuktu.

But the key thing from both Capsey and Wyatt was that, despite not having their best days at the office, they still kept England chugging along – the required rate never went above 8, and that meant Nat Sciver-Brunt and Heather Knight had a platform to gradually chip away at the total through the middle overs.

This took England to within touching distance, allowing Sophia Dunkley and Amy Jones to do the drying-up, with the help of a couple of no-balls just when New Zealand really didn’t need them, taking the pressure off two players who haven’t had great series and who might just have cracked if the Kiwis had been able to really turn the screw at the death.

So here endeth the T20 series, with a final 4-1 scoreline in England’s favour that will have surprised no one. Maia Bouchier was named Player of the Series – her 223 runs almost twice the total amassed by New Zealand’s top run-scorer, Amelia Kerr, who led their way with 114, despite missing the first match on her way back from WPL.

With those two big performances in the 3rd and 4th T20s, Bouch has seized that spot at the top of the order and hopefully will now get the kind of run at that role that Dunkley had and ultimately could not convert. She does seem to have made genuine progress in the past year or so, and I wonder if she’ll one day look at being banned from bowling as a blessing in disguise, allowing her to focus on one thing and move it on to a new level? If so, this will have been where the step up started.