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.

1968

Sharp-eyed Twitter followers will have spotted that a few weeks ago @kentccc1967 became @kentccc1968. This was intended to be the prelude to a brief return to the day-by-day re-creation of cricket and the world fifty years ago, which proved popular among the discerning when applied to the 1967 season last year. The idea was to follow events from the first day of the final Ashes test through to the cancellation of MCC’s tour of South Africa.

It soon became clear that I don’t have the time to achieve even this modest goal. For one thing, work is very busy, for another my Khandallah correspondent and I were married a few weeks ago. She returned from a trip to Auckland recently with a copy of the 1932 Wisden for me, so I won’t do better. 

On the face of it, 1968 should have been a season worth remembering. It was an Ashes year, overseas players were able to play county cricket without enduring a qualification period and bonus points were introduced to encourage brighter cricket. For all this, it was not a summer that shouts out for commemoration.

The Ashes series was a damp and often dull, without quite emulating the torpor of the 1964 series (frighten your children with Tom Cartwright’s first innings figures at Old Trafford: 77–32–118–2).

During the final test against India recently, one of the television commentators revealed that of the previous 31 test matches in England only one had been drawn. Coming into the ’68 series, just over half of the 25 Ashes tests in England since the Second World War had been drawn. England won just four home Ashes tests in that period.

An unfancied Australian team won the first test, at Old Trafford, by 159 runs, England collapsing to Bob Cowper’s soothing trundle in the first innings. Then the rain set in.

After the Lord’s test against India, Mike Atherton wrote a piece in The Times about how ground technology has moved the game along. He imagined how that match would have progressed in an age without top-notch drainage and floodlights. India might well have saved that game, not just because much more time would have been lost, but because they would have had the opportunity to rescue their first innings from a bad start by batting in the friendlier conditions that England experienced.

Let’s reverse the counterfactual. What if the rain-ruined second and third tests of 1968 had had modern ground facilities available? It is probable that England would have won both.

In the second, at Lord’s, Australia needed 273 to avoid an innings defeat (having been bowled out for 78 in the first innings), but, with only two-and-a-half hours played on the last day, survived easily enough.

The first day’s play in the third test at Edgbaston was called off at 10 am. England again gained a considerable first innings lead. A declaration left Australia with 330 to win, an achievable target now, but one that the Ashes-defending Australians would never have attempted in those defensive days. The onset of rain an hour or so into the final day raised hopes that Derek Underwood could be a drying-pitch magician, but it didn’t stop all afternoon.

The match was notable for Colin Cowdrey becoming the first cricketer to play a hundred tests, which he marked with a hundred, all the more meritorious for the fact that he had Boycott as a runner for the latter part of the innings.

The rain mostly stayed away from the fourth test at Headingley, but still there was insufficient time for a positive result. The first three innings each reached just over 300, leaving England 326 at 66 an hour, a fact recorded in Wisden as if it were one of the tasks of Hercules. They gave up soon after tea with four wickets down, the possibility of defeat apparently more shaming than the chance of winning the Ashes was enticing.

In The Times, both John Woodcock and Jack Fingleton identified the superior Australian fielding as the defining difference. Fingleton contrasted the pristine flannels of the home side with those of the grass-stained Australians.

Those who see the selection of Adil Rashid for the test team after he had forsaken domestic red-ball cricket as an unprecedented derogation of county cricket should have a look at the England team at Headingley, in particular at the presence of ER Dexter at No 3. Why had Dexter been brought into the side? What sort of season had he had?

He hadn’t. A few knocks on Sundays for the Cavaliers apart, Dexter’s first innings of the year came against Kent at Hastings on the Saturday before the Leeds test, after he had been given the nod for selection. He took full advantage of the opportunity, knocking up a double century against Kent at Hastings, but what did David Green, Brian Bolus or Alan Jones—to name three players who were having good seasons—think of Dexter’s selection?

As well as Dexter, the selectors brought in another southerner, Keith Fletcher, for his debut. They couldn’t have anatagonised the Yorkshire crowd (who favoured their own Phil Sharpe) more had they gone round Headingley poking each personally with a sharp stick. Fletcher got a first-innings duck, dropped a couple of catches and had a rough reception at Leeds ever after. One senses Dexter making notes for his own spell as selectoral supremo a couple of decades later.

So to the Oval, and a truly memorable test match, the more so because of the rain. Late on the fourth evening Australia were left with 356 to win. Now, that would be thought tough but achievable, but the caution of the era meant that the possibility of an Australian win was barely considered. Fingleton thought Cowdrey too cautious in not declaring.

In the nine overs bowled that Monday evening, Australia lost two wickets. I remember watching on television as a gleeful Underwood left the field having just got Redpath lbw.

Tuesday morning’s television coverage started at noon, half an hour after play began. There was no reason for this other than the cussedness of the scheduler; the hour-long gap between Watch With Mother and the cricket was filled only with the test card. So I’d have heard about Ian Chappell’s leg-before dismissal to Underwood on Test Match Special (Arlott, McGilvray and Hudson commentating).

You can see the Chappell dismissal and that of Doug Walters on this black-and-white footage. That vicious bite and turn from Underwood refutes the notion that Underwood was dangerous only on drying pitches. And what a catch from Alan Knott. If I could choose the last thing that I would see on Earth it would be Knott taking a catch like that off Underwood.

By luncheon (as The Times still called it) Sheahan was also out and Australia were 86 for five. The main question for me was how many of the rest would fall to Underwood.

As they walked off at the interval the rain started to fall. By the time of the scheduled resumption the Oval was a collection of ponds, and a draw looked certain. There is a famous photograph of a forlorn Colin Cowdrey looking across the field like a failed Moses.

With modern drainage the water would drain straight through. It would be out of the question to give fifty or so strangers sharp objects with which to accelerate the drying. It is surprising that there is no recorded objection from the Australians, as it would not have happened if they had been on the verge of victory.

It worked. Play resumed at 4 45 with 75 minutes to go (it was all on the clock, no statutory number of overs to be bowled). For half an hour the pitch was sedated by the rain. Inverarity and Jarman had little difficulty dealing with Underwood or anybody else. Then came the first signs of drying, with the ball starting to kick a little. D’Oliveira induced Jarman to leave a ball that clipped off stump and was immediately replaced at the Pavilion End by Underwood, who made the cricket world aware of what we in Kent already knew: that on a drying pitch he was a sorcerer.

McKenzie and Mallett fell in the first over of the spell, caught by David Brown, insanely close at short leg. John Gleeson survived for a quarter of an hour before leaving a ball that took his off stump. Ten minutes remained when last-man Alan Connolly reached the middle. Throughout the carnage, John Inverarity had remained staunch and defiant. He contrived to face what might have been Underwood’s last over and it seemed that he was within a few defiant lunges forward from saving the game.

But to the third ball Inverarity raised his bat and almost turned his back to the bowler. Charlie Elliott’s finger went up so quickly that it was almost ahead of the appeal, but freeze the video in the right place and you will see that the impact came before the big movement of the leg; it was a good decision. Underwood finished with seven for 50.

It was the tensest finish to a test that I would see on television until Edgbaston 2005. Yet the end is not what the match is primarily remembered for. Much has been written about the Oval ’68 on its fiftieth anniversary, almost all of it about Basil D’Oliveira’s first-innings 158, his initial omission from the MCC team to tour South Africa, his later inclusion as a replacement for Tom Cartwright and the cancellation of the tour.

I have discussed previously the importance of these events of the development of my own political consciousness. Looking at the TV listings, I realise that another strand of my political development was taking place at the same time. BBC 1 had breakfast time coverage of the Democrat Convention in Chicago. I had no interest in American politics but was nine-years-old, so would have watched grass grow for the novelty of having the TV on at that time of the morning. Nor did I know that President Johnson and Mayor Daley had sown up the nomination for Vice President Humphrey. So the theatre of the state-by-state voting (“on behalf of the great state of [insert name here] I am proud….” etc) drew me in. For the first time I understood the thrill of the concept of having the numbers, something that passes the time for me half a century later, on days when there is no cricket to watch.

There is colour footage from the Oval test on YouTube, but according to the television listings in The Times, the fourth test, at Headingley was also in colour, making it the first test match to have live colour coverage, in Britain or anywhere else. Colour TV was restricted to BBC2 at that time, so only the post-tea session would have been seen in its full colour glory. For the rest of the day, the cricket had to share monochrome BBC1 with other sports, or be subject to the random whim of the schedulers.

BBC2 was where the Sunday International Cavaliers games were to be found, so, if The Times listings are accurate (and I am not convinced that they are), the first cricket match anywhere in the world to be covered live in colour was the International Cavaliers v Cambridge University Past & Present. Feel free to take this information and win bets with it.

The other day I caught myself flicking up the collar of my polo shirt as I have for years, so long that I had almost forgotten that the habit started in imitation of Garry Sobers.

Colour cameras had not yet found their way to Wales, so Sobers’ six sixes on 31 August at St Helen’s, Swansea are recorded in grainy black-and-white from over fine leg, Wilfred Wooller combining secretarial and commentary duties. At least they were there. Outside the principality, 1968 seems to have been the year when the BBC gave up covering Championship cricket outside the Roses games, though the ITV regions still took some interest.

As in 1967, Kent finished in the Championship and won one more game than chamopions Yorkshire, but didn’t get the hang of the new bonus points system as well as the northerners did. A good last week at Folkestone reduced the final margin to 14 points but that was closer than it had been for some weeks.

The year before, the Canterbury Week clash between the two had decided the title. This year’s repeat of the same fixture was washed away like so much of the 1968 season, though on the first day Tony Nicholson, who may have asked for the Canterbury pitch to be relaid in his back garden, so partial was he to it, took eight for 22, still the best statistical bowling performance that I have seen in its entirety. The second day was completely rained out, and the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Kent failed to console me. Play resumed only later on Friday, a draw inevitable.

I will recreate a season of the past at some point when I have more time; 1970 or 1978, both Championship years for Kent, would be obvious choices. In the meantime, the domestic season here in New Zealand begins later this week. If I can muster sufficient circulation in my fingers to scribble a few notes, watch this space.