Back at Hamilton: leg spin and an inflatable pub

Northern Districts v Wellington, T20, Seddon Park, 22 December 2018

Scorecard (contains video links of wickets, boundaries and beards).

For the first time since I moved to Wellington in 2006, I have been to the cricket at Seddon Park in Hamilton. I was a regular in the press box there for three years or so from the turn of the century as CricInfo’s man in the central North Island, and reported upon a good deal of interesting cricket while enjoying Northern Districts’ free lunches.

At that time the ground was newly remodelled to double the size of the banking that surrounds two-thirds or so of the playing area, so as to attract more international fixtures. This involved taking out the trees that formed a near continuous canopy around the top of the bank when I first went to Seddon Park twenty years ago. It was pleasing to see that their replacements have matured, returning the rural feel that the ground has despite its central-city location (as I have noted previously, it is the only ground I have spectated at where I have been able to get a haircut and sit-down meal and still been back in my seat for the first ball after lunch). As well as the bouncy castle, without which no T20 match can be played, there was also an inflatable pub.

It was a pleasure to watch under lights in a part of the country where the climate does not necessitate an overcoat, several sweaters and a balaclava to survive the experience. Flags were given to spectators on arrival rather than the thermal blankets that are more appropriate in Wellington. 

The occasion was the opening game of the domestic T20 season, with Northern Districts hosting Wellington. A pleasing scheduling development this year is that many games are double headers, with the men’s match preceded by a women’s game. I arrived in time to catch the last ten overs of so of ND’s innings. Chasing 144, ND were well-placed with 60 or so needed and eight wickets standing, but they collapsed like the morale of the turkey population at this time of year, losing seven wickets for 23 runs.

Amelia Kerr was playing for Wellington. Recently turned 18, in June she broke the women’s world ODI record for an individual with 232 against Ireland. Good judges say that she is a rare talent, and I look forward to seeing her bat. Today it was her bowling that took the eye. She took three for ten with her leg spin, inducing cluelessness in the opposition as only a good leg spinner can. The last time I saw a leggie do that was when Ish Sodhi ran through Wellington at the Basin earlier this year. Though in the other camp, he greeted her with warm approval after the match, the fellowship of the wrist-spinner’s union overriding team loyalty. The ND lower order may not be technically equipped to meet the challenge, but a bowler who lands it with consistent accuracy and turns it both ways with bounce as Kerr does, will bamboozle better players than them.

In the men’s match, Wellington won the toss and put ND in. On a good pitch for batting, as Seddon Park is, I remain of the opinion that it is better to bat first as the pressure of chasing a large total undoes a team so often. That is, more or less, what happened here.

Though Walker wasn’t in the home side here, the other two bearded crowned heads were, and it turned out to be a royalist triumph, though it did not seem that way when Devcich was forced to abdicate from the second ball of the match, top edging Woodcock to short third man.

Devcich was replaced by his emperor-cousin Dean Brownlie who played the most substantial innings of the day, 99 from 45 balls, 76 of which came in boundaries. It was a satisfying combination of muscle and guile. One short of the hundred, Brownlie deserves credit for going for the big hit rather than taking the easy single that was there for the asking.

Each of the first five overs of the innings was delivered by a different bowler. The aim of this is to prevent the batsmen from settling, but it is a tactic that can be more disruptive to the bowlers. Woodcock, for example, bowled a fine first over, but was immediately replaced by Neesham, who was hit for four fours (though more athletic fielding might have turned two of them into catches). One of these was a cross-bat smash by Seifert that rocketed towards non-striker Brownlie at waist height. He just managed to straddle jump the oncoming missile. An inch higher and the line of succession would have been terminated there and then. When Woodcock returned, he got tonked too.

Jeetan Patel, who stepped aside from the domestic 50-over competition, is back for the T20 and made an immediate impact, conning the in-form Seifert to tap the first ball he bowled back for an easy caught-and-bowled. Only a single came from that over, but Patel’s effectiveness diminished with each over that he bowled. In his last over his normally infallible control went missing, and three full tosses all went over the rope, by a considerable margin. I felt sympathy for Patel earlier, when a clear mishit by Mitchell went for six, a sure sign of imbalance between bat and ball. Nofal also went for three sixes in one over, all by Brownlie.  

Hamish Bennett’s clever change of pace restricted ND to four from the last over of the innings, but 215 for six is a T20 total that will win many more games than it loses, even in Seddon Park’s corseted boundaries.

It was good to see Mitch Santner back for ND after being out for nine months with a knee injury. The national team lacks balance without him, and 22 not out and three overs for 28 was a satisfactory start.

Leading the reply, Devon Conway got off the mark with a six over long off in the first over off Devcich, followed by a four through mid-wicket next ball. He hit seven more fours, all pure shots through the off side. It was the best cricket of the match.

It is Conway’s second season for Wellington since moving from South Africa. Such is the way of the world that a televised 45 here set off social media in a way that a double hundred in the Plunket Shield a couple of weeks ago failed to do, with many asking when he will be qualified to play for New Zealand (to which the answer is September 2020).

But returning to the theme of leg spinners instigating self-doubt, the mere appearance of Ish Sodhi ball-in-hand caused Conway to abandon the composed orthodoxy that had served him so well to that point. Sodhi’s first ball he unsuccessfully attempted to reverse sweep. The second he charged at brainlessly and was bowled.

Four of Conway’s boundaries came in Scott Kuggeleijn’s first over, and things got no better for the bowler, who had a shocker. The tenth over of the innings included three wides as he kept getting the slow bouncer wrong. At least that over eventually reached a conclusion. Kuggeleijn’s final over included two above-waist full tosses so he was stood down with two balls of the over left. Paradoxically, he bowled more deliveries than anybody else in the game, wides and no balls included, finishing with 3.4-0-58-1.

However, it was Kuggeleijn’s dismissal of Hose, caught behind from the last ball of the tenth over, that sparked the collapse that gave the game to ND. At that point Wellington were more than halfway towards their target with seven wickets standing, so were still narrow favourites.

But Neesham went in the next over, miscuing Sodhi to cover. Sodhi isn’t always the most economical bowler, but gets the key batsmen out, which is why he is No 6 in the world bowling rankings for T20 at the time of writing. Any hope that Wellington had from this point on was expunged by the deceptively unlikely figure of Anton Devcich.

If asked to demonstrate to a young person the art of pie throwing, simply show them a video of Devcich bowling and the job will be done, or so anyone watching him bowl for the first time might be forgiven for thinking. Any indecision on the batsman’s part would be merely whether to hit him over midwicket or long off. But beware. Devcich is in the great tradition of bowlers who carry the appearance of a friendly spaniel but who can bite like a rottweiler. Chris Harris is the personification of the type, his ambling windmill action apparently doing no more than placing the ball on the tee, yet performing good enough a con to bring him 203 wickets in ODIs. Darren Stevens is another example. Devcich finished with four for 27. Wellington’s last six wickets fell for 12 runs.

One man’s misfortune is another’s opportunity. Much of Kuggeleijn’s waywardness was communicated to the world by Billy Bowden, making the most of a rare appearance before the TV cameras to reprise his full range of theatrical umpiring signals, a Christmas ham a few days early.

The Return of the Kings

Wellington v Northern Districts, 50 overs, Basin Reserve, 4 November 2018

Scorecard

At full strength Northern Districts would be favourites to beat any other domestic team in the world, Surrey included. They have five bowlers in the top 15 of the world rankings in at least one format—Boult, Southee, Wagner, Santner and Sodhi—as well as one of the world’s best batsmen, Kane Williamson, other established internationals De Grandhomme and Watling, and Anderson and Seifert in T20.

“At full strength” is the key thing there. All the above except the injured Santner are on international duty in the UAE at the moment, where the Black Caps are taking on Pakistan in all three formats.

Wellington are without Blundell, van Beek and Rachin Ravindra, all with New Zealand A in the same location. Ravindra’s absence is particularly noteworthy as he is yet to play for Wellington’s senior team in first-class, list A or T20, but has been accelerated into the national A squad because of exceptional promise shown in international age group cricket, another straw in the wind that blows away the significance of the domestic first-class game.

What’s more, Jeetan Patel has opted out of the shorter forms for Wellington this year so as to preserve his aging bones for the next English season, for which nobody blames him in the least. Luke Woodcock has also decided to restrict himself to red-ball cricket, having made more first-class appearances for Wellington than any player has for any New Zealand province.

This is the New Zealand present, and the UK future: the national 50-over competition without the top talent, and with a fair portion of the middling talent unavailable too. This is what it will be like from 2020 when the Hundread (feel free to use that) gets under way.

Today’s match was an illustration of what the game becomes in these circumstances—a contest in who can best disguise their inexperience. Of course, a fine game of cricket can be the outcome, tolerable in the New Zealand spring, but lacking something as the main attraction outside the big grounds in the high English summer.

Andrew Fletcher and Malcolm Nofal opened, ND having won the toss and put Wellington in. Fletcher, who has earned his first professional contract at 25 with a lot of runs in club cricket, has been Wellington’s 50-over star so far, with two centuries in three games. He didn’t start like a man in peak form. One handsome cover drive apart, he was fortunate not to touch at least one of the deliveries that Brett Randell sent down the off-stump corridor.

As so often, a wicket fell after the release of pressure when good but unrewarded opening bowlers were replaced. The deceptively amiably paced Daryl Mitchell came on and had soon accounted for the first three Wellington wickets.

Nofal played casually across to be leg before, Conway feathered a catch behind (from his disappointed reaction the bird was already plucked), and Michael Bracewell top-edged a hook to fine leg.

Mitchell, by the way, is no relation to the Worcestershire player of the same name but is the son of John Mitchell, the former All Blacks coach who seems to be doing a fine job as England’s defensive coach, judging from the difficulty teams from this half of the world have had in crossing the line in the last couple of weeks.

For all Mitchell’s success, there was a right-arm-medium sameness about the Northern Districts attack. Fletcher was given far too many opportunities to play off his pads, which seems to be a strength of his.

Off spinner Joe Walker provided a little variety. He is one of several Northern Districts players whose off field time (there being little else to do in Hamilton of an evening) is the cultivation of big, bushy beards. A field-setting discussion between Walker, Devcich and Brownlie resembled a meeting of the crowned heads of Europe in the years before the First World War.

 

Devcich and Brownlie model ND's one-day and T20 uniforms

At 81 for three, Fletcher was joined by Jimmy Neesham, perhaps the best player left in New Zealand this weekend. At once, he was on the attack with great reserves of timing and power. The extent of his domination can be measured by the fact that when he reached 50, the fourth-wicket partnership was worth no more than 67.

Fletcher edged a catch behind off the slow left-arm of Anton Devcich for 64, but with ten overs to go Wellington were 203 for four, looking to set a target not far short of 300. At that time I wrote a cautionary note saying “all depends on Neesham”. So when he was out chasing a Devcich down the legside in the 42^nd over, estimates of the final total tumbled like those for the post-Brexit pound.

It was a smart piece of keeping by Bocock. Everybody around the boundary thought that Neesham had been stumped, but the clue was that no wide was given. It took the online replay to confirm a sharp catch, the bails whipped off in affirmation. Neesham made 86 from 67 balls with eight fours and four sixes.

That Wellington got as far as 269 was due to some loose bowling and optimistic hitting, particularly from Ollie Newton, whose innings was the cricketing equivalent of the golfer who keeps driving into the trees only to have the ball rebound into the middle of the fairway.

Devcich cleaned up the last three wickets to give him a career-best five for 46.

In the break between innings I called into the Museum, where I was delighted to find that they were having a half-price Wisden sale. I settled on an unusual 1950 edition, bound in hard covers, but dark red with a navy blue spine. I have never seen one like this before. Perhaps it was an individual collector salvaging a dilapidated copy with their own design; one or two of mine could do with some help. It cost NZ$30, which is about £15 at current rates.

That’s No 73 on the shelves in Scorecards Towers, with 1951 the most recent gap. I must get round to writing something in each edition about how I got it and where it’s been so that when they end up on other shelves one day, their story will be known.

Wellington’s opening bowlers Bennett and Newton started well, conceding just five runs from the first four overs. Bennett had Cooper leg before with a full pitch. For the next 15 overs, Northern Districts made decent progress, but it was clear that much rested on the partnership between the Tsar and the King, who, with Mitchell, comprised the bulk of their team’s experience.

At 86 for two in the 21^st over it was pretty even, but Devcich’s slog-sweep to long on was the first of six wickets to fall in the next 12 overs, with just 44 added to the total. The last two wickets added a further hundred, with Randell, Gibson and (especially) Bocock striking the ball well and with spirit. But the rate required expanded throughout, so for those of us who stayed, the experience of the last hour was akin to knowing that your car has passed its warrant (= MoT for UK readers) but having to hang around for the paperwork to be completed.

With four for 34, Hamish Bennett was again outstanding. Nofal took three with his slow left-arm, with the word “occasional” now deleted from that description.

With four of ten rounds completed, Wellington were top of the table. The winner of the group stage hosts the final with second and third playing off for the other place.

The New Zealand season begins

Just two weeks after leading Warwickshire to victory over Kent to seal the Division Two title in the County Championship, Jeetan Patel began another domestic season back home at the Basin Reserve. Thus do the seasons merge into one another. To emphasise that cricket is a global game, nine of the Auckland team here were playing in a T20 tournament in Abu Dhabi on Saturday before dropping 25 degrees or so for a Wednesday start here.

The domestic first-class game in New Zealand is further down the road to extinction than the County Championship. This year we are reduced to eight games, replicating the uneven pattern of Division Two of the Championship, with teams playing some opponents twice and some only once. There was a rumour that the programme was going to be slashed back to the five games of amateur days, spread, perhaps, to make us grateful for being left with eight (cricket administrators can turn even the most rational of us into conspiracy theorists).

Compensation was offered by the expansion of the 50-over competition from eight games to ten, but only when the fixture list was published did it become apparent that the six additional games  were all to be played at the “high-performance” centre at Lincoln, deep enough in the Canterbury countryside to be inaccessible to all but the most intrepid spectator, exiled like a king’s mad brother.

As is traditional at this stage of the season, half of the Basin is a building site. The old dressing rooms have been demolished and the replacement building is half-complete, though having a working building site behind the bowler’s arm was not as disruptive as I expected it to be. The wooden pavilion that was the headquarters of Wellington Cricket has also gone, to be replaced, puzzlingly, by a children’s playground. So there will be swings at Basin, if not swing.

The playground will be in the shadow of what is now referred to as the Museum Stand, formerly the Grandstand. Built in the 1920s, the stand was right behind the line until the square was realigned in the late 1970s. It has been closed for the last five or so years because of its vulnerability to a strong earthquake (though the museum underneath remains open, so presumably it is calculated that the stand would fall to the side—where the playground is being built).

It had been thought that the stand would be demolished, but the money has now been found to strengthen it. Unfortunately, this was the cash that was to have paid for floodlights to be installed, so the ODIs and T20s that are the only matches that would fill the seats in the restored stand will remain at the Cake Tin.

Changes too on the field of play for Wellington. The Gladstonian first-class career of Michael Papps is over at last. Steven Murdoch, a stalwart at the top of the order for almost a decade, has also departed, for Canterbury. Jimmy Neesham joins from Otago. As well as being one of the most naturally talented cricketers in New Zealand, Neesham is much wittier and free-thinking than is usual for a professional sportsman, if his Twitter account (@JimmyNeesh) is anything to go by.

Wellington v Auckland, Plunket Shield, Basin Reserve, 10 to 13 October 2018

Scorecard

I’m still working my way through recordings of the final Championship match at the Oval between Surrey and Essex. The crowds at the Oval are a re-creation of Live Aid compared to the faithful few who gathered at the Basin for the start of the New Zealand season.

The way the fixture list has worked out, this game represented my best chance of seeing a whole game of first-class cricket, so naturally it rained for quite a lot of the time.

Auckland won the toss (we still have the toss in New Zealand, quaint old things that we are) and elected to field, no doubt recalling that in last season’s opener at the Basin they found themselves 12 for seven with the season less than an hour old. The pitch resembled the palette of an artist using only shades of green, but, the odd ball apart, did not produce the degree of movement that its appearance presaged.

It was 45 minutes into the morning when the first wicket fell, the pitch blameless as Woodcock was accounted for by a McEwan yorker. Andrew Fletcher was the other opener. He is a local cricketer finally getting his chance. For years, local clubs have complained that runs and wickets for them don’t count for enough where provincial selection is concerned, so Fletcher is being willed to succeed by aspiring provincial cricketers around Wellington in the hope that would encourage the selectors to look more

Fletcher leg glanced a stylish four, but was out attempting a repeat, the ball deflecting from glove to stumps. An unusual played-on also accounted for Devon Conway, who had left balls millimetres from the off stump with impeccable judgement until he slashed at a short one from Lister only to see it uproot his middle stump.

This brought in Jimmy Neesham for his Wellington debut innings. Characteristically, he began with an off-driven boundary, and followed with eight more fours in a 64-ball 51. He put on ninety for the fourth wicket with Wellington captain Michael Bracewell, who hit the same number of boundaries as Neesham as he made 53, but not as memorably. Wellington supporters want Neesham to do well, but not that well, or he’ll be back in the national squad and we won’t see him.

The breaking of the Bracewell/Neesham partnership removed the structure from the Wellington innings; the last six wickets added only 102 between them, Matt McEwan’s four for 48 being the main reason. McEwan has made his way from Canterbury to Auckland via Wellington, much to the benefit of the fast-food industry in each location, judging by his near-spherical profile. What he lacks in conditioning, McEwan makes up for with bustle, bluster and willpower. His pace is well on the brisk side of medium, and his commitment in the field made me relieved that hard hats were required on the building site, as he charged towards it like a cable-knitted Exocet. He appeals like a pantomime villain (the umpires happy to join in with "oh no it isn't").

The performance of the game came from test opener Jeet Raval. Overnight he was 46 not out, reached his fifty during the short period of play possible on the second morning, and completed the hundred when play resumed for a marathon three-and-a-half-hour session after the rain. Raval was a class above any other batsman in the game, with some lovely shots through the off side and that little bit more time than anybody else.

The Raval/Latham opening partnership is the most settled that the test side has had for a while, though it is wrong to say that it provides continuity given the increasingly long test-free periods that we endure these days.

The third day was washed out completely. It is tempting to go down the predictable road of moaning that cricket shouldn’t be played at this time of year, but the four days before and after this game would  both have made for comfortable playing and watching.

Play began earlier than might have been expected on the last day, given the deluge. By God it was cold, four degrees taking account of the wind chill straight from the Antarctic. I did not move from the Long Room and the free members’ coffee. Once the first innings bonus points had been sorted out, the rest of the day was for practice, both at cricket and polar survival.

Over the winter, the Basin Reserve scoreboard has been working on new ways to infuriate. It was refurbished last year and has a new electronic section that can display a much wider range of information. Given the challenge that displaying with an approximation of accuracy just the total and batsmen’s scores has presented for some years past, this is akin to giving guns to a civilisation that has previously had only sticks.

Throughout this game it played a game of peek-a-boo with us, rotating the batsmen’s totals every six seconds with a variety of other information, including the progress of the over (useful in a one-day game, but not when it is one or two balls behind as it usually was here) and landmarks such as “Auckland 200” (this posted right next to the team total that had told us this already, often several overs ago).

Wellington v Otago, Plunket Shield, Basin Reserve, 18–20 October

Scorecard

The sun returned to Wellington the following week, as I knew it would when I couldn’t get to the game before the third afternoon. By that time, the game was all but over, with Wellington needing six more wickets to complete a comfortable innings victory. This they did over the next three hours, making for a tension-free, but pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

Wellington had made 509 for five declared thanks largely to the two South Africans, Conway with a double century and Nofal with a single. This may make Nofal nervous, as the last time he made a hundred he was dropped for the next game.

Otago are the Glamorgan of the Plunket Shield, or possibly—given how players that they produce invariably move on when their true talent becomes apparent—the Leicestershire. Of the team here, readers who do not make a study of New Zealand domestic cricket are likely to have heard only of Hamish Rutherford.

They were bowled out for 190 in the first innings, and were four down and still more than 250 short of making Wellington bat again when I got to the Basin.

Hamish Bennett took four in the first innings, and was enjoying his work with the assistance of the northerly now (the northerly is the good wind here, bringing warmth; it is the southerly that breaks bowlers’ and spectators’ hearts). New Zealand has more fast bowling strength now than at any time before. Boult, Southee and Wagner are all in or around the world top ten, and Kent’s Matt Henry stands in reserve, but Bennett in the form of the last two years would let nobody down if called upon. He has real pace and the experience to use it to maximum effect.

The Basin pitch was one of its best. On the third afternoon it still offered pace and bounce to Bennett, but also some assistance to Jeetan Patel. The balance between bat and ball was just as it should be at this stage of the game.

It was a treat to watch a long spell from Patel, just returned from another successful season at Edgbaston, this time as captain. When I hear English commentators talk about spin bowling, they tend to use Patel as their benchmark of excellence. He has never had that level of respect here, even being relegated to twelfth man duties once or twice. He has skippered Wellington only occasionally, when he would seem the obvious candidate in all forms, as he is for Warwickshire. At the time of writing, he has 817 first-class wickets. Could he get to a thousand, probably the last to achieve that?

So there we are, not yet Halloween and half Wellington’s domestic first-class programme done. The next Plunket Shield game at the Basin is four months hence.