Hat trick No 10: Gus Atkinson

 

Gus Atkinson, England v New Zealand, Basin Reserve, 7 December 2024

Scorecard

On the second morning of the second test between New Zealand and England at the Basin Reserve I achieved something that Zak Crawley managed for the first time in the series only the previous day: I reached double figures. It took him an over; it took me 60 years, though collecting hat tricks is a more patient process than blasting runs.

The response to these pieces among veteran cricket watchers suggests that my strike rate of roughly one hat trick every six spectating years is a pretty good one, luckier than average. This one was the second in test matches, and the first in first-class cricket, since that Ashes coup by Darren Gough at the SCG 25 years ago. All three in the interim were in 20-over cricket, the frenetic nature of which tends to make the exceptional mundane.

New Zealand were struggling at the start of the day at 86 for five, 195 in arrears. Tom Blundell, who has navigated New Zealand out of choppy waters so often that he should have a lifeboat named after him, was there so even the RA Vance Pessimists were not without hope. 

Not for long. In the fourth over Brydon Carse bowled Blundell with a cracker that moved away to hit the top of off. Nightwatchman Will O’Rourke followed two balls later, leg before for a 26-ball duck. Nathan Smith now joined Glenn Phillips. These two defy the stereotype of New Zealand cricketers as meek and self-effacing. Both are combative and free of the national inferiority complex, so aspirations towards a deficit under a hundred were not completely fanciful. 

Gus Atkinson has not so much entered test cricket as stormed in through the skylight, distributing grenades as he comes. He has taken more wickets in a debut year than any bowler before him and threw in a debut century at Lord’s as a premium. He is quick: the first and third balls of the hat trick were just short of 140kph, but is also accurate, has plans and can bowl to them. Carse could be similarly described, so if Wood, Stone and Archer can be persuaded to spend the next eleven months residing in large boxes of cotton wool, England will have quite an attack for the Ashes. 

It was the fifth over of Atkinson’s spell. Both batters were becoming established and had taken a boundary each off him. From the stand, it first appeared that Smith had shouldered arms to the third ball of the over and lost his middle stump by doing so. In fact, the ball had bounced more than expected and had come off the inside edge of the withdrawing bat, so still a bit embarrassing, but not nearly as much. 

Henry’s first ball was brutish, rising sharply at the throat. It was as much as he could do to fend it off to gully, where Duckett took a low catch, a delivery that would have got a good many top-order batters out. 

New Zealand fans have had an ambivalent attitude to Tim Southee this season. We are grateful to have the opportunity to salute an outstanding career as the series becomes his valedictory procession, but hardly any of us think that he should be playing, his bowling mojo having gone missing some 18 months ago. 

As a potential hat-trick victim he was interesting. Southee has never been averse to swinging away in defiance of the circumstances—a sideshow in this series has been his pursuit of a century of sixes—which prompted the setting of the oddest hat-trick ball field of the ten, with fielders dotted around the legside as if arranged according to where they were when the music stopped. 

Atkinson played the bluff and bowled fast, straight and full. Southee wafted at it vaguely as the ball thudded into the pad and there was the hat trick. There was a curious coda as Southee called for a review, as is now standard when there are unused reviews at the end of an innings. By the time the process had concluded all the players had left the field, leaving the umpire to confirm the decision in a void. If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound, and if an umpire raises the finger on an empty field, is it really out?