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Wellington v Central Districts, Basin Reserve, 50 overs, 2 February 2024
We knew that it would rain. The forecast wes decisive. Yet still we turned up at the Basin. Rain is to cricket people what death is to everybody else. We know that it is inevitable, but we carry on as if it wasn’t there. This game at the Basin showed why we behave in this curious way.
The match was abandoned, as we always expected it to be, with the points shared. But we saw some fine batting and bowling, some terrible batting and bowling, collapse, recovery, and (possibly) skullduggery. A brilliant day.
Wellington won the toss and chose to bat, defying the convention that when Duckworth, Lewis and Stern are about you bat last so that they show you their working as you go. Central demonstrated later why that is a good plan.
Nor did the top and middle order justify the decision. When the rain first came, after 20 overs, Wellington were 76 for six. There was some good bowling, notably from Basin Reserve anti-hero Blair Tickner who nagged away on an off stump line and conceded only eight from his first four overs. Central skipper Dane Cleaver (cousin of Kane Williamson) maintained attacking fields, thinking that rolling Wellington cheaply would be the best chance of beating the weather.
This was the first round of matches in the resumed 50-over competition following T20s that started just before Christmas, but the home batters seemed unaware of the change of format, apparently competing in recklessness. There was Severin’s hoick to deep mid-wicket, Kelly’s shovel to deep third, McLachlan’s first-ball waft outside off and Smith’s catching-practice glide to slip (all of which can be viewed via the scorecard link, above).
The rain came first after 20 overs, causing an interruption of 70 minutes. As they resumed one of the Basin regulars asked which of us would take 130 as Wellington’s total. I was inclined to accept. Resuming for Wellington were Muhammad Abbas and Logan van Beek. Here, readers need to be aware of a backstory. A week before, Wellington played Canterbury in the elimination final of the T20 competition. With an over to go, Canterbury required 21 for victory. Van Beek was the bowler. He has been Wellington’s death bowler of choice, but the memory of his being hit for 33 off an over at the end of the match against Central a week earlier fluttered at the back of my mind.
The first two balls both went for a single, so with 19 wanted off four, Wellington’s place in the final seemed booked. The trouble was that van Beek relied completely on yorkers, but could not quite land them, so it was all low full tosses, two of which Matt Henry hit for six, and as in that disastrous over at the Basin, there were a couple of wides. With just a single from the penultimate ball it was Zac Foulkes who faced the last, needing three to win. Another full toss was sent to mingle with the trees, and Wellington were out. So if redemption was available, van Beek wanted a share.
In the T20s, 20-year-old Muhammad Abbas has made a name as a strokeplayer. Here he showed that judgment and the ability to bespeak his game to the occasion is part of his package. Van Beek matched him in restraint; no boundaries were hit, or attempted, in the first seven overs after the resumption.
Gradually, they increased the pace. In the 30th over Abbas twice straight drove Small to the boundary. In the 41st, Abbas went down the pitch to hit slow left-armer Lennox for six over long on. Van Beek did the same from the last ball of the over, and hit seven more sixes in the remaining six overs. The Central bowlers, so disciplined and accurate earlier, now became the opposite.
Abbas was out for 65 from 77 balls. His seventh-wicket partnership with van Beek was worth 159, beating the previous Wellington record of 130 by Bell and Mather against Northern at Blake Park, Mt Maunganui. I was there for that one, on New Year’s Day in my first summer in New Zealand.
Van Beek was out in the final over, for 136 from 99 balls including 11 fours and eight sixes. It was the second-highest score ever made by a No 8 in List A cricket worldwide, beaten only by an innings in the domestic competition in Bangladesh.
DLS got to work on Wellington’s 281 for eight, and reduced it to a target of 274. Usually an interruption to the innings of the team batting first results in an increased target, but the loss of so many early wickets meant that the algorithm determined that to have fewer overs in which to preserve scarce resources was an advantage.
It was clear from the start of the Central reply that there was no chance of the innings lasting its course. It is essential in these circumstances that the players have accurate information about DLS targets; it is with regret, therefore, that I inform you that the North Koreans are once more in control of the Basin Reserve scoreboard.
Long-time readers will recall that for some years the amount of fake news purveyed by the board led me to believe that Kim Jung Un and his mates were using it to undermine the moral fibre of the western world. It has improved more recently, but now they are back.
What do we ask of a board? The basics are the team score; who the batters are and what they have; and who is bowling. Only the first is consistently available at the Basin this season. Batters’ scores flash on for six seconds before disappearing; the bowler’s name does the same, except during the second half of the T20 innings when it was not shown at all. A miscellany of other information is there instead, including what had happened earlier in the over, a comparison of progress in each innings (always a useless statistic), even how many balls were left after one over of the 47 had been bowled, and the weather in Pyongyang, all instead of what we actually wanted to know (I made the last one up, but the rest were there). At one point, the number of wickets lost was shown in three places, but the batters’ names nowhere. People who knew anything at all about cricket would not commit these atrocities of misinformation, so the North Koreans it must be.
In the circumstances the DLS target, updated every ball, would also have been useful, but this was left to the hand-operated board, and was changed only at the end of each over. With the rain getting ever closer, the Central openers, Boyle and Heaphy, made good use of this information, and made sure that they were ahead as they approached the 20 overs that are the minimum needed to allow a win by one side or the other. This is when the trouble started.
The rain was timing its approach as precisely as the Central batters. As the 20th over began we were in the transition from damp to wet. Nathan Smith was bowling from the southern end, into the northerly (I had not mentioned that a gale was blowing at the Basin as regular readers will assume that). Three runs came off the first three balls. The umpires were starting to look at the sky, each other, and the sky again, but were prepared to stay long enough for the bowler to run in three times more to give us a match. The first of these was a legside wide.
Smith ran in for the second time, only to pull out as he reached the umpire, protesting at the gale, the King Lear of the South. At the next attempt he managed to let go of the ball, landing it mid-pitch, then watched it bounce high and wide to the boundary for five wides. This was enough for the umpires, who called a halt, rightly given the strength of the rain.
Words were exchanged between the teams, with Smith protesting that (and I remove a couple of adverbs here) the wides were not deliberate, and that the last one slipped. Here it is; decide for yourselves. Had the incident become more widely known, the keyboard protectors of the Spirit of Cricket would, no doubt, have had little sleep over the last few days. Up in the RA Vance Stand we thought it rather clever. Had a Central bowler done the same we would doubtless have been outraged, but so it is with most of these tests of the game’s tenuous morality.
It was a good day at the cricket.
