Picking a team for the first match of the tour to England is going to be one of the easier jobs Mike Hesson has this summer, since New Zealand have exactly 11 players fit and available for the match starting at Taunton on Friday. Three of those are not even in the squad for the Test series but are making up the numbers while the rest of the team are away in the Indian Premier League. Six of Hesson’s squad are in the IPL, Brendon McCullum, Kane Williamson, Corey Anderson, Tim Southee, Trent Boult and Matt Henry. They are expected to arrive in England around 18 May, so they will have all of two days to prepare for the Lord’s Test.

New Zealand have had to get used to this situation, as have West Indies and Sri Lanka, who also tend to be given the early slot in the English season, “the entrée for the Ashes” as Hesson calls it. New Zealand Cricket did ask the England and Wales Cricket Board to switch around the itinerary so that the ODIs came before the Tests, which would have meant their best players did not have to go straight from the shortest format to the longest one. The ECB refused. It was a similar story on New Zealand’s last two tours here, in 2008 and 2013, though back then they were only missing three or four players, rather than six.

“We’ve done it for a couple of years now,” says BJ Watling, who will be the stand-in captain against Somerset. “The boys have played enough cricket to deal with it.” It happened last year too, during a tour of West Indies, and they still managed to win the first Test by 186 runs. Hesson says it has “become part of the landscape”. He has developed a few strategies to deal with it. The bowlers out in India have a batch of the Duke balls to practise with, “so when they arrive they don’t need too much time to get up to speed.” For the batsmen, he says, it will be about using those two days at Lord’s to “get a bit of volume in, get used to watching every ball.”

The ECB has every right to insist its own international schedule should not be dictated by the needs of a domestic tournament in India. A cynic could be forgiven for thinking it would suit England just fine if New Zealand are off the boil at the beginning of the series. New Zealand have a dismal record in England – they have won only four out of 52 Tests here, and the last of the victories was in 1999. But the two sides have rarely seemed so evenly matched as they are right now.

That is reflected in the rankings. England are fourth, New Zealand fifth. There are only three points between them, whereas the gap between England and the No1 side, Australia, is 21. New Zealand have not lost a Test series since they were last in England, two years ago. Since then, they have drawn against Bangladesh and Pakistan, beaten India, Sri Lanka, and West Indies twice.

Look through their squad and they stack up pretty well next to England’s, with Williamson and Ross Taylor the backbone of the batting, McCullum and Martin Guptill adding plenty of firepower, Anderson as the all-rounder, and then that brilliant new-ball attack of Boult and Southee. Guptill, who has just scored 227 for Derbyshire against Gloucestershire, has a side strain but should be fit for the first Test. Hesson reckons Southee and Boult will be relishing the prospect of bowling at Alastair Cook, in particular. “We’ve been able to have a little bit of success against Alastair, home and away bar the Test at Leeds (when Cook scored 130). Trent asks him some pretty tough questions, with the angle and the swing that he creates, so hopefully we can get it swinging over here and challenge him early on.”

Other than that, Hesson is too diplomatic to dwell on England’s trouble. He has not “paid a heck of a lot of attention”, though he later reflects “there’s always periods of transition, isn’t there? Especially when you have new personnel. Coaches always want to put their stamp on things, and generally when there is change there is always a little bit of upheaval around that.” Reading between the lines, you sense he and his team can sniff England’s vulnerability. It was just three months ago, after all, that they battered England by eight wickets in the World Cup.

That in itself, Hesson says, means there is “definitely more of an expectation” that the team will perform well in England, which he admits “we probably haven’t had a lot of” in the past. “What that means? Well I guess we’ll find out in the next month.” He seems quietly confident.