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.