A Restful Time at the Basin Reserve

 

Wellington v Auckland, Plunket Shield, Basin Reserve, 5 – 7 November 2022

Scorecard

Restful would be as good a description of this game as any. The scoring rate clung to two an over like lion cubs fearful of straying too far from their mother. I was there for the first two days. The Basin was a picture in the sunshine, but the southerly kept me in the Long Room where the main topic of conversation was whether the pies are as good as last year’s.

Wellington were put in. With spring moving into early summer, the pitch was not such a radical shade of green, official rather than provisional, if you will. The movement it provided was not extravagant, but was constant. I have not, for a long time, seen the ball pass the outside edge as often as it did on the first day. It was this that explains the slow scoring, provoking the batsmen into an abundance of caution. The pitch was not particularly slow, with good carry through to the keeper.

Auckland’s left-arm opening bowler Ben Lister was unlucky to take only the wicket of Georgeson. On another day he could have had five or six, but might his response to constantly beating the bat without finding the edge have been to pitch it up a fraction more?

Tom Blundell was, yet again, top scorer. He came in at 102 for four, not a crisis, but the innings was in need of taking more exercise and being put on a better diet. Troy Johnson, with 42, was the only other Wellington batter to get more than 20. Somebody said that Johnson had scratched about and looked out of form, but it takes a decent player to scratch about for three hours.

The wickets were shared around the Auckland attack, including two for off-spinner Will Somerville, who is the Flying Dutchman of New Zealand cricket, doomed to sail the Seven Seas forever and never see home, as a test player at least. All six of his test appearances have been in the heat and dust, and he may get the call to go to Pakistan over the New Year. Look at Somerville and the way the selectors have treated Jeetan and Ajaz Patel over the years and you might conclude that in New Zealand we treat dogs better than we do spinners.

Auckland’s first innings was, in many respects, a copy of Wellington’s. Solia was the dogged presence at the top of the order, and Ben Horne the keeper who bolstered the innings at No 6. But the chorus was more vocal for the visitors, with 44 from George Worker (a member of the Aptly-named XI, along with Boycott and PJ Hacker of Notts, among others) and a tenth-wicket partnership of 55, so though it looked much the same, a lead of 124 was the outcome.

The pace was just as stately. It was as if Derek Shackleton was bowling at one end and Tom Cartwright at the other. It was 1969 all over again, cricket with Nixon in the White House and Harold Wilson in Downing Street. I found it calming.

There was a short flurry of excitement when, after 96 overs Auckland found themselves 44 short of the second bonus point, available for the first 110 overs of the first innings. Horne was provoked into a temporary abandonment of pacifism and 250 was reached in just eight overs, after which tranquillity was restored, with just nine from the next seven overs.

In my absence on the third day, Wellington were shot out for 132, leaving Auckland with just seven for victory. Lister was more successful in locating the edge of the bat, with four wickets, and Somerville took three more.

And that is it for me and the Plunket Shield for this season. Yes, in the equivalent of early May I have seen all the domestic first-class cricket available to me in 2022/23. With two tests at the Basin when the competition resumes next year, Wellington’s home fixtures are all scheduled before Christmas. In fact, with India using the ground for practice ahead of a T20 at the Cake Tin, the fourth (and final) “home” game was in Palmerston North, two-and-a-half hours away and not in Wellington at all. Yet Fitzherbert Park is an appropriate alternative to the Basin in that it is the only other ground I know of on which the prevailing weather is a gale sufficiently strong to gather up small dogs and children and deposit them in neighbouring streets.  

Shorter forms of the game dominate the fixture list for the next couple of months.

 

 

 

Early Adventures in the Plunket Shield 2022

Wellington v Northern Districts, Basin Reserve, 18-21 October 2022

Wellington v Canterbury, Basin Reserve, 26­-28 October 2022

The early-season blogger faces a perennial challenge when reporting the first games at the Basin Reserve: how to convey the sheer greenness of the pitch. Peter Jackson’s movie studios are nearby. Having limbered up on Tolkien, are they applying their CGI artifice to Wellington’s cricket blocks, producing a verdance that nature cannot match?

As we have established before, a surface of that hue is not necessarily as pernicious as it would be in England. Northern Districts made 225 batting first in the season opener, and that was the lowest total of the match. The case for the pitch’s defence became more shaky for the second game, in which Wellington’s aggregate total was their lowest in 116 years of the Plunket Shield. However, their innings were punctuated by Canterbury’s 338 for eight declared, with a century for Tom Latham and a fifty from Henry Nicholls. Throw in Matt Henry’s seven for 44 in the match and it becomes clear that this was a pitch that sorted the wheat from the chaff with considerable efficiency.

I was able to be present for only one session of each match. For the Northern Districts game it was pre-lunch on the fourth day. ND started the day 225 ahead with six wickets remaining, apparently heading for a declaration close to lunchtime, but seamers McPeake and Sneddon expunged all six for just 23, leaving Wellington with a target of 250. It was one of those collapses that give the team that suffers it a greater chance of victory, closing the innings earlier than a more cautious declaration would have dared. This was a whisker from being the case here.

The highlight of both my mornings at the cricket was the batting of Rachin Ravindra. He puts me in mind of the young Ramprakash (though our man is left-handed) for the precocity and fluidity of his shots. Of course, that comparison raises questions about whether the class will translate to the top level. I hope that the national team management desists in using him as a No 7 who can bowl a bit of spin, and waits until he can be given a decent run in the top four. On this morning he hit several sumptuous cover drives before getting out to a legside strangle.

When I left at luncheon (as John Woodcock would say) Wellington were 77 for four, so ND would have considered themselves to be ahead. I caught up with the live stream (a more basic affair than in the UK, with just a single static camera) when Wellington were about 20 short with eight down. That they were this close was down to Tom Blundell, who performed an innings resurrection like those he undertook with Daryl Mitchell during the recent tests in England. Adam Leonard went in a manner similar to Ravindra with six left to get, and it was last man Hartshorn who secured an inside edge to the fine-leg boundary for the winning runs. This was four-day cricket at its best.

There was no such tension when I got to the Basin for the third morning of the match against Canterbury. The weather forecast was for rain in the late afternoon and for much of the following day, so the visitors had declared on the previous evening, setting Wellington a target of 378. They started the day on nine for two.

Again, Ravindra’s batting was worth the trouble of going to the Basin. He hit three offside fours off the otherwise near-unplayable Henry that were Goweresque in their languidity. This time it took a good one to get him, a ball from O’Rourke that rose a little and left him on off stump. With nightwatchman McPeake in support, that wicket did not fall until we were into the second hour, but thereafter only Blundell and the agricultural Newton made double figures. It was all over in time for lunch.

Despite the crushing defeat, Wellington have the same points as Canterbury and the two teams lead the Plunket Shield table after two of the eight games.