Scorecard
We’re a cautious lot, we New Zealand fans. If our
interest was the theatre, we would have gone to the Cake Tin yesterday hoping
for a decent performance of something worthy. Ibsen, say, or Pinter. The provincial
reviews had been good, but this was the West End, the knock-out stage. All we
wanted was for the Brendon McCullum Players to remember enough lines to get us
to the semi-final. Instead we got the most lavish Broadway show imaginable,
full orchestra song and dance from start to end. Martin Guptill: the Musical.
What I love about cricket is its capacity for surprise,
its ability to exceed expectation. After, yes, half a century watching the game
you think you know what the parameters are. You assume, for example, that you
will never see someone, particularly a New Zealander, score 237 not out in a
World Cup knock-out game.
It was glorious. This New Zealand summer has conjured
up cricket that stands with the best of the past fifty years. Williamson and
Watling at the Basin, Southee at the Cake Tin, Sangakkara anywhere, McCullum
everywhere. This innings of Guptill’s was the best of the lot. It has to be
judged against Cowdrey at Canterbury in 1975, Richards at Lord’s in 1979,
Slater at Sydney in 1999, to name but three, as the best I have seen.
It was the shots he didn’t play, as much as those he
did, that measured its quality. No reverse laps, ramps or premeditated
movements. Pure cricket, from the Rolex timing of the push drive that sent the
first ball of the innings to the straight boundary to the pull that put the
ball on the roof in the final over. Watch a recording of the innings and see how
straight is the backlift, even for cross-bat shots. As well as being spectacular
and surprising it was aesthetically pleasing, which the best batting always is.
Incidentally, it is not true, as has been reported, that
Craig McMillan is the only batsman to hit the ball onto the roof of the Cake
Tin. Guptill has done it once before, off Lonwabo Tsotsobe of South Africa in a
T20 in 2012, a hit estimated at 125 metres, 15 metres longer than yesterday’s.
His two-fingered gesture to McMillan after the hit was not, as Simon Doull said
on commentary, to say “two of us have done it” but “I’ve done it twice”.
Michael Lumb of England also did it, in a T20 in 2013.
Guptill’s innings changed in tempo. At times early on
runs were hard to come by. His century came up in 111 balls, which is hardly
laggardly. At that point it was already a classy, memorable innings. He got
there in the 35th over, just before the start of the powerplay. With
only two wickets down, the foot could be pressed firmly to the floor.
Cricket is a game of numbers, and those for this match
stretch credulity. Guptill’s second century came in just 41 balls. All eleven
of his sixes came after the century mark. 207 came for New Zealand from the final
15 overs, 85 from the final five. It was wonderful.
From the third ball of the first over, Marlon Samuels
became Dick Rowe for a day. Rowe was the Decca Records executive who, in 1962, refused
to sign the Beatles on the grounds that guitar groups were on the way out. Samuels
had the opportunity to send Guptill back to the rooms, but put down a sharp but
catchable low chance at square leg. That was the only one Guptill offered. Just
as Rowe would have spent the following years avoiding news of the Fab Four’s
record sales, so Samuels spent the next 49 overs looking in any direction but
that of the scoreboards as they audited the ever-increasing scale of his error.
A word in praise of Ross Taylor, who has been a worry
for New Zealand supporters during the World Cup. He is hard to get out, but has
got stuck in situations that he has hit himself out of in the past. Yesterday,
he began slowly, with 23 off 43 balls, but he scored a run a ball thereafter
and supported Guptill superbly in a partnership of 143, an excellent platform
for the ensuing carnage.
Guptill is very fast between the wickets but is sometimes
more cagey about his intentions than his partner would find ideal. We had
already had one episode in which he and Taylor headed intently for the same
end, so it was no surprise when Taylor was run out.
Earlier, Williamson had looked in as good touch as
Guptill and it was a surprise when he got out to a soft shot. Later, Anderson,
Elliott, Ronchi and Vettori all added to the mayhem.
My heart was filled with joy at New Zealand’s display.
Yet it was also a little broken. I have written often enough about how early
exposure to the West Indians fed my love of cricket. One of them was at the
Cake Tin yesterday: the great Clive Lloyd of Guyana, Lancashire and the West
Indies, the captain who brought together Jamaicans, Bajans, Trinidadians et al
and made them a great West Indian team.
For Clive Lloyd, watching the shambles that the West
Indies became in the final fifteen overs of the New Zealand innings must have
been awful. How can the team of Richards, Sobers, Marshall, Greenidge, Holding
and the rest have come to this?
To see England humiliated was comedy. To see the degradation
of the West Indies was tragedy. The writer Dileep Premachandran recently tweeted
“each time West Indies do well, the inner 10-year-old pumps his fist”. Today,
the boy wept.
Jason Holder, the 23-year-old fast bowler who has been
lumbered with the captaincy, looked bereft towards the end, and placed himself
at long on, symbolically near the exit to the dressing rooms. It is always a bad sign when the skipper fields
on the boundary. A little later, Darren Sammy, one of many recent captains, was
seen in heated debate with the bench.
The fielding lacked commitment. Where were the dives, where
were the support fielders? How the crowd roared later when all three of New
Zealand’s slip fielders chased a ball to the boundary. What a difference.
So it was good that the West Indies took an adventurous
approach to their futile task of chasing 394 for victory. They achieved more
than was expected in maintaining a rate of eight an over for the 31 overs that
they lasted.
But, in the words of a young member of the catering
staff who took a seat behind us when they ran out of chips, West Indies were
doing well “apart from the wickets thing”. Indeed. In cricket, it’s the wickets
thing that gets you in the end. The wickets fell regularly and they never stood
a chance of getting near. New Zealand knew how much protection they had and did
not panic.
There were two noteworthy aspects to the innings. First
Daniel Vettori’s catch at third man to dismiss Samuels. Vettori has always been
highly competent in the field, but has never presented the world with an
athletic persona. So, when, at the age of 36, he executed a perfectly timed,
improbably high standing jump to pluck the ball from the night, it was as
surprising as Maggie Smith rapping.
My Blean correspondent and myself have long been connoisseurs
of one-legged innings, those made by batsmen under physical duress. The
benchmark has always been Basil D’Oliveira’s half-century in the Benson and
Hedges final in ’76. Despite his elderly hamstring having pinged earlier, D’Oliveira
almost turned the game.
There was Basharat Hassan’s century at Canterbury the
following year. Also Terry (though it might have been Michael) Parlane’s
hundred at the Basin four or five years ago.
Chris Gayle’s 61 from 33 balls, with eight sixes, may
have beaten them all. He has a bad back and could only hobble singles when
there would normally have been a safe two. All of us who thought that Gayle’s
non-appearance against the UAE was simply because he couldn’t be arsed, owe him
an apology. Yet his hitting was devastating, if Sisyphean.
New Zealand’s two World Cup games at the Cake Tin have
been two of the best days I have ever spent at the cricket. Years hence I shall
remember them if I can’t recall my own name. The nation has become consumed
with cricket. You hear people talking about it as you walk down the street. I
have always wanted to live in such a place.
Tuesday, South Africa, Eden Park.