The speed of the communications revolution around
the turn of the century was astonishing. In 1997 it was potted scores in the
stop press. By 2000 satellite TV was bringing us games from across the globe
and I was clicking instantaneous news of cricket in New Zealand by return. The
contrast between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries could not have been
sharper.
It emerged that CricInfo was to set up an
operation in New Zealand with a good slice of funding from New Zealand Cricket,
who were concerned at the decline of press coverage and did not want to miss
out on the dotcom explosion. Lynn McConnell, one of New Zealand’s most renowned
sports journalists, was appointed New Zealand editor. I let him know about my
recent work for CricInfo and that I was available throughout the summer.
In return I received an offer of 20 (later increased to 24) days’ work as a
reporter, filling in across the middle of the North Island when nobody more
reputable was available. The pay was $150 a day, which was ok for 25 years ago,
with generous expenses for overnight stays and mileage.
There were two CricInfo representatives at
each fixture. As the reporter my job was to write a series of up-to-the-minute
reports through the day. For a first-class game this would be a morning preview
followed by reports at all drinks breaks, lunch, tea and the close, with a wrap
on the day to follow embellished by a few quotes from coaches and/or players.
This was demanding, but easy compared to the ball-by-ball scorer, who had to
record and briefly describe each delivery, a heroic feat of concentration over
a full day. I was fortunate to work mostly with Gareth Bedford and a Canterbury
University student called Dean, whose surname I can’t remember. Both were
extremely capable and very good company. One day Gareth went a bit quiet, and
in response to enquiries revealed that he was live scoring not only the game we
were working on in Hamilton, but also the one in Dunedin, 1200km away. I began
to suspect that scorers were recruited from another planet of superior
lifeforms. Few of the live reports survive. Here is one,
from a 50-over game.
Cricket Max was to T20 what Cro Magnon Man is to
Homo Sapiens, though Australopithecus might be a more appropriate comparison,
given its southern hemisphere origins. It was the invention of Martin Crowe at
the behest of the new Sky TV company here in New Zealand. The network wanted
some cricket to retain subscribers through the oval-ball free summer, and to
establish a foothold in the cricket market with an eye to nabbing the rights
from TVNZ a few years down the line.
There has been a recent spike of interest in
Cricket Max, with articles in both The Cricketer and The
Nightwatchman. Both acknowledge the inspiration it offered for the
development of T20. By the time I encountered it, most of the fripperies—the
earliest iterations had a fourth stump—had been removed. It was a 20-over game
of cricket, but divided into four innings and still with the double-scoring max
zone between long on and long off.
By 2000 Sky had a satellite and the rights to
cricket on both sides of the Tasman, so had no further use for Cricket Max. New
Zealand Cricket recast it as a curtain-raiser to the season played mostly in
small towns. So it was that my career as a professional cricket writer began in
the unlikely surrounds of Albert Park, Te Awamutu, a pleasant town in the
southern Waikato that has plenty to offer except, on that occasion, a cable
long enough to connect the press tent to a phone socket. So once again, I had to
speed back to Rotorua to file my reports.
My debut as a reporter providing live updates came
a few days later at Rex Morpeth Park, Whakatane, on the Bay of Plenty coast,
another town getting its first and last exposure to provincial cricket.
CricInfo’s view of the game was through a slit in the wall in the hospitality
area of the pavilion. Despite the testing surroundings I managed to file a
report within seconds of the end of each innings and felt quite pleased with my
efforts until I discovered that I had missed a hat trick. In my defence, everybody
else had missed it too, including the scorers (who found it during their
post-match checks) and the bowler himself, Simon Doull. It was spread over the
two innings, effective camouflage in the frenetic surrounds of Max. Doull also
registered a king pair, all within three hours.
That summer I reported from six other locations
around the North Island. The ground I spent most time at was Seddon Park (then
WestPac Park), Hamilton, Northern’s HQ. It had the best media facilities, with
a press room with a great view of play, and a fridge with an endless supply of
refreshments. Not only was I paid to watch and write about the cricket, I was
also given a free lunch everywhere. It was what heaven must be like.
At first, the presence of we amateurs in the press
box was greeted with polite suspicion by the professional journalists, but we were
accepted once we showed that we could do a reasonable job. The two reporters
with whom we shared the Seddon Park press box most often were Terry Maddaford
of the New Zealand Herald and Ian Anderson of the Waikato Times. Newcomers
were invited to guess the date on which Terry had last not gone for a run. It
was sometime in the early 60s. “What happens if you get a cold?” someone once
asked. “I go running everyday so I don't get colds” was the reply.
It was in Hamilton that I reported on first-class
cricket for the first time, in what was called the Shell Trophy, the Plunket
Shield with a whiff of the forecourt about it. Auckland were the visitors. The
national team were in South Africa, losing all but one of the six ODIs and one
of the three tests, but there were plenty of familiar names left at home,
careers in ascent or decline, Lou Vincent, Dion Nash, Doull and Bruce Martin
among them.
Only the report on the second day appears to be
accessible. I made full use of ongoing disputes about who had actually won the 2020
US presidential election.
This
was a day so tense and full of unexpected twists and turns that it would have
been no surprise had Al Gore turned up to demand a recount…With thirteen
wickets having fallen on the first day the batsmen had as much trust in the
pitch as in a Florida election official.
Who would have thought then that we would come to
feel nostalgic about the presidency of George W Bush?
I also covered domestic four-day games at Owen
Delany Park in Taupo and at McLean Park in Napier. The latter, between Central
and Northern, was the best contest I reported on in the Shell Trophy that
season. The daily wraps are here
(but the scorecard and heading that it is under relate to a different match
altogether: the CricInfo archive is chaotic). Central’s Craig Spearman
made chasing 290—by 70 the highest total of the match—look simple. 80 of his 90
came in boundaries. On his day Spearman looked a world beater as
Gloucestershire supporters were later to discover.
At the conclusion of that match I drove to New
Plymouth on the other side of the North Island to cover a four-day game between
the under-19 teams of New Zealand and South Africa, the final contest of a
three-match series. The venue was Pukekura Park, quite the most beautiful cricket
ground I have ever seen. On three sides there are grass mounds shaped like
ziggurats with room for just one row of seats on each level. The fourth is open,
giving a view of the Tasman Sea, which generally has the aesthetic decency to
shimmer with a deep blue hue. If ever a cricket ground deserved a pavilion with
a thatched roof it is this one, but its only disappointment is the nondescript
building that serves this function. Happily, we were stationed therein, so did
not have to suffer a view of it to spoil the idyll.
New Zealand’s captain was one Brendon McCullum. This
was my first look at a player who became one of my favourite cricketers. My report on the first day
shows that I liked what I saw, but as McCullum had scored a century in each of the
first two games of the series and repeated the feat here, it did not require
profound insight to identify his promise. What impressed me most about
McCullum’s innings here was not his aggressive strokeplay but his reaction to getting
out for exactly 100. It was reasonable to expect that a young cricketer who had
just made his third international century in three games might return to the
rooms sporting a satisfied grin at the very least, but McCullum was furious,
his ire directed only at himself for giving it away.
Ross Taylor was in the New Zealand XI, at sixteen,
three years younger than most of the rest. He knew scorer Dean, so spent a bit
of time with us and impressed with his composure. The other big star of the future
in this game was Hashim Amla, who completed his third half-century of the
series. My assessment: “Amla is a fluent timer of the ball and particularly strong
on the off side” was on point, but again no more than a statement of the
obvious.
The second and third days of the match were washed
away by the rain. A family of ducks moved from its pond to deep mid-wicket as
it was wetter there. I had several chats with the South African coach Hylton
Ackerman, who was gratified that I remembered him playing for Northamptonshire
and the International Cavaliers in the sixties. With Ackerman’s approval I turned these conversations into a feature.
I also covered three ODIs between the two teams,
two at Owen Delany Park and one at Eden Park No 2 in Auckland. I was again
impressed by Hashim Amla:
But
it was the batting of 17-year-old Amla that really took the eye. He seems to
have the right shot for every delivery and all the time in the world to play.
His fielding is somewhat short of the rigorous standards demanded by the modern
game, but if he has the temperament to go to the top, he surely has the class.
There was a flash of Bazball too:
McCullum
threw it away by hitting Botha straight to Zondeki at mid off. His 44 came from
23 balls, and included six fours and two sixes. McCullum's innings was
glorious, but his departure meant that a New Zealand batsman was out in the
forties for the fifth time in the series.
Most of the players in that series went on to have
solid careers in domestic cricket, notably Wellington’s Luke Woodcock. A few,
besides those previously mentioned, performed well on the international stage,
intermittently, at least: Ian Butler, Jesse Ryder, Johan Botha (then a notably
ill-tempered quick bowler; the transformation into a dodgy-actioned spinner
came later) and Monde Zondeki. For a
few, this was their zenith, though Taraia Robin can be satisfied that he was
the inspiration for my best headline: “Batsmen and Robin Rescue New Zealand”.
In those pre-T20 days it was the 50-over Shell Cup that
occupied the holiday weeks of high summer. Northern’s home opener in Hamilton
saw CricInfo’s reporter in sardonic mood:
In
an age when cricket scores and other, less important, information, can go round
the world in the blink of an eye, it is amazing that communicating a simple
decision over the length of a cricket pitch can sometimes prove so,, difficult. Yet this was the downfall of
Central Districts in Hamilton today, as five batsmen were lost to run outs.
The highlight of this game, and of several others
over the next couple of seasons, was the reinvention of Simon Doull as a
pinch-hitting opening batter.
The week between Christmas and New Year took us to Blake
Park, Mt Maunganui, adjacent to where the Bay Oval now stands. The media facilities
here consisted of a truck with one side opened up. I had a dodgy back at the
time, and the pained manner in which both I and Radio Sport’s Kevin Hart went
about boarding it caused one of our colleagues to claim that they had reported
two beached whales to the SPCA.
The first of two games provided controversy for the
tyro reporter to sir up. What should have been a brief interruption for rain
was prolonged because of a tear in the covers. This meant that play extended
into a gloomy evening, causing the umpires to agonise over whether there was
threat to life from medium-pace bowling on a slow pitch. Repeated conferences
on this matter occupied time in which the game would otherwise have finished,
until the Northern batters were finally given the option of going off, an offer
that, nine down but ahead on Duckworth/Lewis, they were quick to accept.
The lead umpire (but you have already guessed this)
was Billy Bowden, who CricInfo held chiefly responsible for the day’s
perplexity. This was the start of 25 years of gentle fun that I have had
mocking Billy’s propensity to discover reasons for preventing cricket from being
played. The live
reports for this game survive. The unusual ending was discussed on Radio
Sport the next day, in reaction to which I wrote an
opinion piece that was appropriately mocking in tone.
The reporters were expected to embellish the
close-of-play wrap with a few quotes from those involved, usually the coaches. This
example, from a wet day at Cornwall Park in Hastings, has contributions
from Dipak Patel of Central and Tony Sail of Auckland. Patel was always good
value, offering honest and interesting views, delivered in a New Zealand accent
that suggested he was a born-and-bred Kiwi. Yet fifteen years before I had had a chat with him in the Bat and Ball Inn
opposite the St Lawrence Ground in Canterbury when he spoke with the brogue of the
West Midlands in which he was raised. As someone who has tried and failed for almost
30 years to acquire a New Zealand timbre, I remain envious of such linguistic
adaptability.
Other coaches were less loquacious and needed a bit
of help. For one I adopted the practice of saying “would you agree that”
followed by a take on the day’s play. The interviewee would consider this for a
few seconds and then say “that sounds about right”. My words would then be attributed
to him in the report.
What a summer it was. Being paid to travel round
one of the world’s beautiful places to watch and write about cricket with free
accommodation and food. My work had been judgesdsufficiently satisfactory for
me to be first call for anything south of Auckland and north of Wellington in
the following season.
