Aaron Finch had not snuffed it, he was only stunned

Aaron Finch’s form line had been flatlining but a reprieve allowed him to prove critics wrong and comes as a relief to selectors.

Aaron Finch rode his luck on Wednesday and scored a much-needed half century

The Finch has landed.

The flap hopefully endeth here. The pet shop owner was right all along. This bird had not snuffed it, he may have been nailed to his perch, but he was only stunned and on Wednesday he worked himself free of the shackles.

Aaron Finch was flatlining up to that point. He had scored just 395 from 29 T20 innings and didn’t look like he was going to score many more when he was hit on the pads first delivery.

The game doesn’t usually look after a batsman in bad form. Misfortune accrues. Misery begets more of the same. Great catches are plucked from the sky, umpiring errors compile to compound their own, but the game smiled on Finch.

We know not whether one innings is a sign that his luck and form have turned, but every indication was there as he cleared his mind and freed his feet to counter the wiles of New Zealand’s demanding attack.

There have been instances where a slice of luck has turned a career. Casting back through Australian cricket, moments involving Mark Taylor, Justin Langer and Adam Gilchrist come to mind.

In 1997 Taylor, the Australian captain, arrived for the Ashes in England trailing a string of low scores from the previous summer. Things were going so bad that when he confirmed to an immigration official at Heathrow that he was the same Taylor who was Australian captain, the Englishman said “aah, but for how long?”.

He couldn’t find a run in the one-day series and failed in the first innings of a tour match against Derby. He then edged a delivery when on just one in the second innings.

Taylor was going so bad that The Daily Telegraph had reported he was about to announce he would not play the first Test and two media outlets were running a campaign for the public to “Donate runs to Tubby”.

The ball he edged in the second innings of the tour match went straight to Derby captain Dean Jones, who promptly dropped it.

The Australian captain survived the near-death experience and put in a few more productive seasons for his country.

Gilchrist’s career was waning when he edged an early ball from Andrew Flintoff between third slip and gully at Perth in the 2006-07 series.

“If I am going to go, I might as well go positively,” he told himself at the time.

The second 50 of his century that day came from just 17 deliveries.

Langer was due the hangman’s noose when he nicked a ball from Wasim Akram in the second innings of the Hobart Test against Pakistan in 1999. People at the ground that day said they heard the noise from the other side of the fence. The opener said it was a “clicky bat handle”, but some years later he admitted he had “smashed it”.

The only person who did not hear it was umpire Peter Parker.

The reprieve turned out to be the turning point of Langer’s career.

If Finch had been given out by the standing umpire on the first delivery on Wednesday, he would not have been reprieved by DRS and would have had little standing to complain about rotten luck as replays showed a fair portion of the ball connecting with the stumps.

He was, however, given another life and the relief at his subsequent half century extended from the crease to the coaches box, the selectors’ shelter and on to the broader Australian cricket community.

The least concerned about all the palaver appears to have been Finch himself.

“I was just short of runs. It‘s never easy when you’re trying to lead the side and you’re not performing as well as you would like personally.

“But you always put the team first. I felt as though my captaincy has been pretty good throughout this period as well, right through the Big Bash.

“I obviously would have loved to have got some more, but I was never doubting that I would never get runs again.”

Finch said on Thursday that he had just concentrated on the simple things rather than any great technical adjustment.

“When you’re searching for a score sometimes you can forget the absolute basics, you get a bit fixated on the end result and not what’s right in front of you at the time,” he said.

“At times it was a little bit of wanting so desperately to get some runs that you forget to watch the ball. As soon as you don‘t … 1 per cent can be enough in this game to have you off and you’re out.

“So it was just trusting my process that, for the past 10 years, has been pretty solid and has given me a great foundation to bounce back from.”