Wellington v Auckland, Plunket Shield, Basin Reserve, 11 to 14 December 2014

http://www.espncricinfo.com/new-zealand-domestic-2014-15/engine/match/770765.html

Fourth day

My Life in Cricket Scorecards achieved a lifetime’s ambition at 10 am on Sunday morning; for the first ten minutes of the day it constituted the entire crowd. The first two-and-a-half overs were its private entertainment and it could barely suppress a cry of “Proceed!” before the first ball was bowled.

The early start was down to the weather, which had curtailed progress over the first three days. Play did not begin on the third day until 4 pm when the temperature was measured at six degrees. A penguin wouldn’t accept a free ticket in those conditions. I’m sure that the mercury dropped to similar levels on the Hammond Room roof at the County Ground, Bristol in April days of yore, but I was younger then and my desperation for cricket after the long English winter always set my judgement askew.

So it was not until the fourth day of this Plunket Shield game that I put in my first appearance of the season. Overnight, Wellington were 77 ahead with seven wickets standing, so anything could happen. That’s the delight of first-class cricket: a run chase; a collapse; a canny declaration; elegant attack; sticky defence; the ball turning square; the ball not turning at all; a great catch; a missed stumping; a shambolic run out. Or the whole thing can end in torpid anti-climax. A night at the theatre with a different ending every performance.

One thing was certain: a Cachopa would be involved. There were three of them playing for Auckland: Carl, the all-rounder, Craig, the opening batsman, and Brad, the wicket-keeper. All the size of pixies. In Wellington’s first innings the Cachopii had a hand in nine of the ten wickets.

Today’s script dropped some heavy clues about the denouement almost before the orchestra had finished playing the overture. Left-arm opening bowler Michael Bates removed both the incumbent batsmen in the first quarter of an hour. Stephen Murdoch was caught behind driving at a ball that left him. Tom Blundell was struck on the pads playing across the line. Umpire Ashley Mehrotra took an age to rule. By the time the finger was raised Blundell had already taken several steps towards the rooms.

Another thing that makes cricket the king of pastimes is that even when you have watched for as long as I have it will still conjure something new. Today, when fast bowler Matthew Quinn bowled to debutant Henry Walsh, he did so with seven in the slip cordon, a silly mid off and a mid off. Nobody left to field on the legside then. So when Walsh turned a ball from outside off stump into the vacant acres, as was inevitable, it was the bowler who had to pursue it.

Rob Nicol's 9 - 0 field for Matt Quinn

The best that can be said for this is that it offered Rob Nicol (the Auckland captain) a controlled environment in which to exercise his psychological need to test half-witted theories, rather than exposing society at large to harm.

Walsh lasted for ten overs before losing his leg stump to Bates. It took only a further eight overs for Auckland to finish Wellington off. The most eye-catching feature of the lower-order batting was a series of millionaire off drives from Ili Tugaga, his preferred approach to getting off the mark. When, against expectation, he succeeded in hitting the ball with one of these pieces of speculation, he was caught at mid off for a duck.

That was Carl Cachopa’s third wicket; Bates finished with four for 47.

So what explains Wellington’s subsidence? There was movement, certainly, though the report that described the pitch as “green” was exaggerating, from what I could see at least.

Just as happened when I watched Gloucestershire collapse on the first morning against Kent in September, the ball tended to find the edge of the bat rather than beating it entirely, and most of the edges went to hand. Still, seven wickets had fallen for 50 today, so Auckland’s target of 128 might not be the early Christmas present it seemed.

Opener Jeet Ravel started impressively. He is a tall left-hander with a wide stance and expansive style. A square-driven boundary off Arnel was the shot of the day, but Ravel was out quirkily off the next delivery. As the ball rose off his thigh pad, Ravel attempted to lift his arms clear, but in doing so committed the very indiscretion he was seeking to avoid. He deflected the ball with just enough power to dislodge one bail when it came into contact with the stumps.

Two of the Cachopii—Carl and Craig—were now united. Carl had earlier survived a Gillespie appeal on the grounds that it was too high on the leg, a rare event for one of the brotherhood. The partnership was worth only four when Craig was bowled by a full-length Matt McEwan delivery.

With Auckland 29 for two, Wellington were bouncy. Another couple of wickets and they would be on top.

Colin Munro put an end to such pretensions. Munro is one of those cricketers who takes much the same approach regardless of the format or state of the game. Hard, clean hitting is to Munro what cold baths were to the Victorians: the palliative for all ills.

Here, 59 off 49 balls, 52 of them from boundaries (four sixes), settled the matter. He was particularly harsh on the normally abstemious Arnel.

Munro was out 24 short of victory, but look at the scorecard and you will be misled. It says that he was caught by Walsh. It was indeed Walsh who caught the ball on the long-off boundary, but he was still shuffling his feet to ensure that he did not connect with the boundary rope when he threw the ball to the nearby McEwan, who should therefore be credited with the catch.

McEwan is a bustling medium-fast bowler in the manner and shape of Tim Bresnan. This was his Wellington debut after a couple of seasons with Canterbury. The ball followed him about for a while. He took a fine catch to get rid of Carl Cachopa, running back with his hands above his head, but dropped an even harder chance diving in from the fine-leg boundary in a brave attempt to intercept a Nicol top edge.

It was too late to make a shred of difference anyway. Auckland won the game by six wickets and were top of the table after two rounds. Most of the Plunket Shield will be played while the World Cup is in progress, so I may be a lone spectator again before the season is out.

Mote Park, Maidstone

On our recent visit to the old country I treated my Khandallah correspondent to a trip to Mote Park in Maidstone. The park contains 450 acres of mature parkland, a 30 acre lake, a stately home and a rich history in which Elizabeth Woodville, Henry VIII, Ann Boleyn, Elizabeth I and William Pitt the Younger all feature.

All of this we ignored.

The sole interest of our visit was the north-west corner of the park, where one of the finest cricket grounds in Kent is to be found.

Maidstone Week, usually in the first week of July, sits in the memory as the best of summer. Sun baking a flat, fast pitch from a clear blue sky; the woods across the valley pulsing in a light breeze; Asif Iqbal shimmying down the pitch to send the ball rasping through the covers; the birdsong tempered only by the welcome purr of the ice cream van’s generator.

Of course, the memory tints the image. In 1980, for example, it began raining in the late afternoon on Sunday and there was not another ball bowled until five on Thursday.

The good news is that it is still a cricket ground, unlike the Crabble in Dover for one. It is home to the Mote CC, one of Kent’s most famous clubs, and staged two Kent Second XI Championship games last season. But there has been no county cricket there since 2005 when a dodgy pitch caused Kent to be docked eight Championship points.

Pitches can be put right. The expense of taking cricket to the outgrounds and the period-charm nature of the Mote’s facilities are why the county has not returned, and is not likely to.

So I was pleased to be able to introduce my correspondent the ground much as it was throughout the three decades that spans my watching cricket there.

Though located a walk away from the town centre (lunchtime food replenishment is possible—the Mote holds a three-egg rating*), the outlook from the ground is predominantly rural. From the bank on the southern side one looks across the valley to the scarp slope of the North Downs, on their way to Dover to form the white cliffs. So many shades of green.

The cricket field is located on the middle of three tiers. The top level is the home of Maidstone RFC and a car park. The grass slope down to boundary is the main spectator area. In this respect, the Mote is more like a New Zealand ground. Of course, in Kent we are not as outré as to come into actual contact with the grass. There must be seating. In the seventies, this was rusticity itself. Planks of four by two balanced precariously on upright logs. Most days were enlivened by a row of stout parties finding themselves on their backs, feet waving in the air.

The Northern End

For cricket week the marquees lined the boundary from the bank to the scoreboard at the Northern End. There’s a short expanse of concrete terracing, from which we would watch Sunday League games when the bank tended to get overfull.

The Pavilion

Square to the pitch is the mock Tudor pavilion, which I once saw Clive Lloyd clear with a six. Further along, the boundary bulges back into the field of play, making space for a square, terracotta-coloured building known as the Tabernacle. Originally the private pavilion of Viscount Bearsted, it was used as the club office on match days. Both buildings date from 1910.

The Tabernacle

I first went to the Mote in 1972, when I saw Alan Knott hit his second century of the match, against Surrey. I was last there in 2002, for a resounding defeat of Durham in the Sunday League.

From the end of school until a reluctant entry into the world of work I would be there throughout cricket week. After that, the Mote always drew me back to Kent for the weekend.

There was so much fine cricket, some of which was in my mind’s eye as I walked the boundary and rested on the bank in September:

·       The day in 1976 when a helicopter landed on the square with the Sunday League trophy, just as Colin Dredge was run out in Cardiff, meaning that Kent had won it.

·       Two wins in 1978, the last year Kent won the Championship, with 19 wickets for Derek Underwood.

·       Losing to Middlesex by one wicket in the rain in 1981.

·       A fluent double hundred by Graeme Fowler in 1984.

·       My reward for turning down tickets to Live Aid in 1985 to go to Mote Park instead: a run-a-ball century by Roger Harper.

·       Mark Ealham setting about Derbyshire in general and Dominic Cork in particular for a 44-ball century in 1995, the fastest ever in the Sunday League then.

I was surrounded by the ghosts of spectators long gone, on their backs, feet towards the sky.

*The My Life in Cricket Scorecards Scotch egg ratings rank cricket grounds according to ease with which food supplies can be replenished during the day.

Only Folkestone has ever held the prestigious five egg status, the only ground in my experience to have a supermarket close enough for the replenishment of Scotch eggs during a drinks interval without missing a ball. Challenging certainly, requiring speed, strategy, cunning and the ability to knock aside old people without feeling remorse, but it could, and has, been done.

Unfortunately, Folkestone was subsequently downgraded to four eggs after the supermarket was rebuilt with the entrance at the other end of the building. Why don’t these people stop and think?