Saturday, February 8, 2020

Double T20 triumph for Wellington



Forty-two years had passed since I last saw my team win a domestic one-day final, on that happy but drab day when Kent beat Derbyshire over 55 overs. Though I returned to Lord’s with Kent on six further occasions (to be related in future editions of the continuing but occasional series on Lord’s Finals That I Have Seen) all of them were defeats.

It might be thought to be a bit of a stretch to call Wellington “my team”. For nine years Northern Districts were my New Zealand team, when I lived the Bay of Plenty, but I have sat in the teeth of the southerly at the Basin Reserve these fourteen summers now, so claim freeholder privileges. My long wait was rewarded with two wins in one afternoon, as both the Wellington women and men won their finals.

Here in New Zealand finals are played at the home ground of the team that wins the league stage of the competition (except when the venue has been booked for another event, which was what happened to deprive Wellington of the staging rights for the final three years ago—this only happens in Wellington). The women’s game had been scheduled for Saturday and the men’s for Sunday, but the sensible decision was made to delay the former and to stage the two matches as a double-header.

Even better, spectators were offered free admission if they arrived before 2 pm, about scheduled mid-innings in the women’s game. This ensured a good crowd for both fixtures. I haven’t seen the RA Vance Stand as full for a long time. What’s more, there were plenty of young people, girls especially, there for a first taste of the Basin on a big day. It brought families to the cricket, something that we are often told is the point of the shortest forms, but rarely seems to result, particularly in England where finals day at Edgbaston looks like one of Hogarth’s more graphic depictions of human depravity.

It’s been a funny summer in Wellington. Much of the rest of the country has sweltered while we often find ourselves shrouded in low cloud, temperatures ten degrees lower than they are less than an hour away. This was such a day. With the strong breeze making the mist dance across the field we half expected Catherine Earnshaw to emerge from the gloom to open the bowling from the Southern End.

There was sufficient moisture with it to delay the start, truncating the women’s game to seven overs a side. The fewer overs there are in a cricket match, the more of a lottery it becomes. Wellington had won all their ten games in the round-robin stage, so it would have been an outrage had the weather cost them the title. Put in by Auckland, Wellington and New Zealand captain Sophie Devine ensured that was not going to happen with a commanding 54 off 23 balls including five sixes, all straight and all but one clearing the men’s boundary as well as the women’s. Some people (or rather some men) believe this to be significant, but I’m not among them. That the women’s T20 relies less on pure power than the men’s makes it more of an all-round display of cricket skills.

Wellington’s 81 for two was well beyond Auckland’s powers. Wickets fell regularly to Wellington’s bowlers who were much tighter, particularly Amelia Kerr, whose two overs conceded only nine runs. Watching Kerr bowling leg spin is one of the highlights of the contemporary New Zealand season.

Four of the players in the men’s game—Blundell, Phillips, Somerville and test twelfth man Jamieson—I had last seen in Sydney a couple of weeks previously. At least here they could be sure that the fog on the surrounding hills did not contain smoke particles. I watched from the warmth of the Long Room.

As in the women’s game, Auckland won the toss and put Wellington in. T20 games are often like those TV cooking shows where contestants have to concoct something tasty, or at least adequate, from supplied ingredients, small quantities combining to make something tasty. Here, as usual, the hero of the dish (we watch plenty of these programmes, so have absorbed their distinctive vocabulary) was Devon Conway. He is the leading scorer in all three forms this season, and by such margins that, as Peter Bromley said of Shergar’s Derby win, you’d need a telescope to see the rest. The analogy is appropriate as Conway will shortly disappear, from Wellington colours at least. He qualifies for New Zealand selection in a few months’ time, and will be in the team for all forms, without a doubt. His 49 here was one of his more modest efforts, but was comfortably top score. A spectacular catch at short extra cover ended his innings, taken by Auckland captain Craig Cachopa, the last surviving member of the band of small but perfectly formed Cachopii brothers, represented, it seemed, in every provincial team just a few years ago.

Conway and Blundell put on 60 for the third wicket, after which there was something of a collapse, with five wickets falling for 40. Michael Bracewell and Logan van Beek brought some relief to Wellington supporters with an unbeaten stand of 33 in three overs, 20 of which came from the final over.

Nevertheless, a look at the scoreboard where Auckland’s batting order was listed meant that none of us were confident that 168 was enough. Guptill, Munro and Phillips are as destructive a top three as there is in any T20 competition. In a group match just the week before, Wellington had removed these three for 33 and thought the game over, only for Chapman and Cachopa to take it away with a partnership of 132.

Guptill and Munro were well on the way to giving the innings the necessary launching pad, causing the collective blood pressure in the Long Room to climb like the Saturn V, when Munro was given out caught behind off Bennett. Note the “given” in that last sentence, necessary to render it an accurate representation of events. Thinking their decision-making impaired by the cold, the umpires referred the decision to their warmer colleague in the stands. No snicko or hotspot was available, and the replays, did not seem definitive. But out was the decision, so Munro was sent on his way, complaining until he left the field. The usually phlegmatic Guptill was moved to debate the issue with the officials. The Auckland innings did not recover from this injustice. Wickets fell regularly; Guptill apart, only Cachopa reached double figures.

The trail of batsmen to and from the rooms muted Guptill’s aggression. His 60 came from as many as 53 balls, but while he was there the game was always just a few blows from being Auckland’s. The 22-run margin of victory makes it look a stroll in the park, but it seemed to anxious Wellingtonians more a barefooted marathon on hot coals.

I always relish the star player in a final being someone who does not experience the international limelight, for whom this is the biggest of days. Here, that was Logan van Beek. Without the runs that he and Bracewell bludgeoned at the end of the innings, Wellington would not have had a defendable total. He took the wickets of Cachopa, O’Donnell and Hira in five balls in the fifteenth and seventeenth overs.

In the following over he was waiting on the deep mid-wicket boundary the direction in which Guptill hit what looked like a six. Van Beek stretched to take the catch while balancing on an invisible tightrope just a couple of inches inside the boundary. He tossed the ball up before he stepped out of the field of play, reclaiming the ball on his return.

Not much more than a decade ago, such a catch would have been considered extraordinary, but now they are commonplace, as van Beek proved by repeating the trick two balls later to dismiss Horne. An over later, coming in from cover boundary, van Beek sent in a perfect throw to run out McClenaghan, so he had a hand in six of the nine wickets that fell.

Had you told me, as I watched Alan Ealham raise the trophy at Lord’s in 1978, that I would wait 42 years to next see my team win a one-day final, and that when I did it would be half the world away and that the captain’s name would be Sophie Devine, I wouldn’t have believed you.







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