The CricInfo years: 1999-2000

In 1999 I turned 40. It seemed as venerable then as it does youthful now. I had lived in New Zealand for two years, a big jump that had paid off royally. It was time to take another. I resigned from my teaching job to have a go at making my living more creatively, particularly through writing.

I bought a computer, complete with TV-sized monitor, and connected it to the new wonder of the time, the internet. My email address was simply my initials, pph@... There are plenty of things in my past that show how much the world has changed in my lifetime. When I was a child I had measles. Learning to drive involved mastering the choke if you wanted the car to start on a cold morning. And, when I moved to New Zealand in 1997, if I wanted to know how Kent had got on overnight I had either to ring my mother and wait for her to find the right page on Ceefax or hold fast for 24 hours for the potted scores in the New Zealand Herald. The full scorecard was not available until the following Thursday when I would buy (and in itself this shows how a desperation for information can erode all standards of decency) the international edition of the Daily Express.

So the first website I looked at was CricInfo. I had heard about this. A place where you could access the latest scores of matches around the world, sometimes ball-by-ball as they were played and run by cricket enthusiasts much like myself. It was almost time travel. I noted that the daily global email newsletter contained little or no New Zealand content and saw an opportunity as I strove to conjure up a freelance existence.

Over the next few months I sent in articles on domestic cricket such as regular round-ups of domestic matches, relying heavily on the comprehensive radio coverage then (but no longer) provided by Radio Sport. Of the pieces that survive online, the earliest is this one, an untypical contribution putting the possibility of an Indian victory after a low first innings score in the test match being played at Chandigarh in historical context. It may be surmised that the bar for accepting contributions was set barely off the ground. There is also a piece reflecting the “outrage”, real or imagined, of the South Island at being denied international fixtures in the forthcoming season. 

The West Indians toured in December and January. I submitted a preview. They were to play New Zealand A at Owen Delany Park, Taupo, an hour south of Rotorua where I lived. My offer to provide a daily report (unpaid, as was all my work that summer) was accepted. So began my career as a cricket reporter. In the following years I joined the rest of the media in the press area at the back of the stand at Owen Delany Park, and was appreciative of the free lunch, perhaps the finest on the circuit. But in December ‘99 I was unaccredited and still apprehensive about masquerading as a journalist in the company of professionals, so I wrote from the anonymity of a garden chair on the grass bank that surrounded most of the field. The same diffidence inhibited me from approaching Viv Richards, briefly West Indies’ coach, when he paused close by as he prowled the boundary. I was yet to appreciate the credibility, deserved or otherwise, that a byline could bestow.

“Wrote” is a precise description too. Wifi was not in anybody’s vocabulary and laptops were as exotic and expensive as they were unreliable, so the reports were compiled with pen on paper, constructed in fragments during the day, and stitched together in the last hour, the aim being for the last full stop to coincide with the final delivery of the day. Then it was into the car for the drive against the clock back home, where I would key the piece into Word, click on the internet connection, hoping for the reassuring four notes followed by white noise, and off it would go at 56kb/s, if I was lucky. Several hours later the daily CricInfo newsletter would make the return journey with my name over the report. I found this unreasonably exciting. Each day’s report is still listed on CricInfo but all the links lead to that for the second day (which reads as if it is incomplete). They were also carried by the Barbados Nation, whose reply to my invoice I still await. 

The match was dominated by a double hundred by Shiv Chanderpaul. It was not so much the work of an artist as that of an efficient painter of walls and ceilings. Of batters since, only Steve Smith has equalled Chanderpaul in scoring massive amounts of runs in such an aesthetically unsatisfying manner. 

It was a pleasure to once again watch Courtney Walsh, having done so throughout his Gloucestershire years. With the possible exception of his predecessor Mike Procter, nobody has offered more value as an overseas player than Walsh. There is an excellent interview with him in the latest County Cricket Matters by the wonderful Annie Chave (subscribe if you haven’t already). He speaks of the value to West Indian cricket that the county game offered and of his enjoyment of the “family” of Gloucestershire. Another time. 

I watched most of the first test, played in Hamilton just before Christmas, though I wasn’t reporting. It was a good match, mostly remembered for the statistical anomoly of the highest first-wicket partnership for a losing team: 276 by Adrian Griffiths and Sherwin Campbell in the first innings. That this was so was largely down to Chris Cairns. He top-scored with 72 in the first innings, coming in at No 8 with New Zealand 107 behind, out when the lead had been achieved. This was followed by one of the finest bowling performances in test cricket for this country: seven for 27 to rout West Indies for 97 to set up a comfortable nine-wicket victory. Cairns is the forgotten man of New Zealand’s cricket history, but is our greatest all-rounder, capable of seizing any match of whatever format and transforming it with bat or ball, or, in this case, both.

The only other match that wrote a report on that summer was the second of five ODIs against the visiting England women in Hamilton, once again composed from a garden chair on the bank followed by a foot-down drive back to Rotorua and more frantic typing. 

The best thing that has happened to cricket in the intervening quarter-century is the revolution in the funding and status of women’s cricket. There was no TV coverage of this series and radio coverage, at a time when there was extensive commentary on men’s domestic matches in New Zealand, was limited to brief reports. There was no English media presence (apart from me, I suppose). Women’s cricket was making its first tentative steps into the professional era. England had Paul Farbrace and Graham Dilley as coaches. I had come across New Zealand’s bowler of the day, Rachel Pullar, a year or so before when she and Chris Harris visited the school I was teaching at, both employed to run a series of coaching sessions, one of the first opportunities that women players had to earn a living within the game (and showing that the men were not rolling in it either). Pullar and Harris were both superb, by the way. None of those playing in Hamilton that day would get rich from playing cricket at that time. 

Both teams had suffered a clean sweep in ODIs in Australia before this series. England’s response was to change captains mid-tour, reportedly in response to a threatened mutiny against Karen Smithies, who quit, handing over to Clare Connor. My most prominent memory of that game in Hamilton is not of the play, but Smithies walking a lonely, forlorn circuit of the ground having been dropped from the playing XI. New Zealand’s resounding win was the fourth in a five-match sweep, led by Emily Drumm, one of those leaders who you could tell was in charge from her demeanour even if you were looking down from space. Drumm, together with her predecessor as skipper Debbie Hockley, were among the initial inductees to the New Zealand Cricket Hall of Fame recently. She led New Zealand to victory in the World Cup later in 2000, a team that contained eight of the players in the XI at Hamilton. 

The other international visitors that season were the Australians, who played three tests, six ODIs and two other first-class games. I did not report on any of these contests, but did provide a preview or two, which have not survived on CricInfo’s database. Chris Rosie, a very nice guy who had recently retired from the New Zealand Herald, but who had not been a sportswriter, covered the test series and the game against Northern Districts, but there are no reports on the ODIs. Apparently, it did not occur to me to offer to write reports while watching the TV coverage. Not the done thing at all. Now (and starting only two or three years after that) most CricInfo content is written by people watching the telly.

I was there for most of the test match and provincial game at Seddon Park, Hamilton (though it was then masquerading as WestPac Park). By the turn of the century warm-up games for tourists had lost their allure in most parts of the world. When we lament their disappearance from the schedule it should be remembered that the failure of home teams to provide the best available opposition was a factor in their decline. Not so in New Zealand at that time. Northern Districts put out their strongest team, one that contained nine past,  present or future internationals. Justin Langer and Damien Martyn put on 197 to set up a comfortable five-wicket win. 

Two memories from that game. Brett Lee, presumably at the receiving end of an untypically churlish remark from one of the batters, went “through the crease” and unleashed one of his thunderbolts from about three yards short of the traditional 22. Colin “Funky” Miller, he of the electric blue hair, bowled off spin to the left-handers and seam up to the right-handers, swapping as many times as was necessary in the course of an over. Maybe this was not unprecedented; but it would have taken a Sobers or Barnes to do it, and it was the first time I had seen it. 

Australia returned to Hamilton a few weeks later with the series already in the bag after two wins. Though culturally disinclined to remove the foot from the Kiwi  throat, they teetered at 29 for five in reply to New Zealand’s first innings 232. Adam Gilchrist was next in and ignored completely the constraints that the situation would conventionally impose. His 75—64 of them in boundaries—took just 80 balls, secured a first-innings lead and provided the basis of Australia’s for a six-wicket win. Bazball is really Gillyball recycled. McGrath and Lee took 14 of New Zealand’s wickets between them and Langer made another Hamilton century. 

In May 2000, Dave Crowe, father of Martin and Jeff, passed away. He was the New Zealand correspondent of The Cricketer at the time, so, with my freelancer’s instinct to sniff out possible work overcoming natural reticence, I emailed the magazine to offer my services. They replied thanking me for my message, saying that they were wondering why they hadn’t received Crowe’s copy for the next edition. Bryan Waddle was appointed as his successor. However, the dotcom boom was on and CricInfo was taking a greater interest in New Zealand…

The 2006/07 Ashes Revisited

The lockdown has been kind to us here at Scorecards Towers in Wellington. We have both been busy working from home, in a big house with plenty of books. People who watch County Championship or Plunket Shield cricket are likely to be temperamentally suited to lockdown life. What’s more, Sky TV NZ’s cricket channel has been a treasure trove of delight; archive material is filling the Sky box, lifestyle programmes and earnest dramas surreptitiously deleted to make room.

Best of all, they are reprising whole Ashes series, first 2006/07, then 2010/11. Not highlights, but full days, with the commercial breaks edited out, so the over rate cracks along.

I knew the outcome of the 2006/07 series of course: a five-nil drubbing for the old country. There was a fair smattering of memories: England losing at Adelaide when it seemed impossible to do so; Gilchrist’s onslaught at the WACA; most of all, a lunchtime pub in Wellington falling silent for the first ball of the series, then erupting in laughter as Flintoff collected it at second slip. Of the fourth and fifth tests I had almost no recall at all; I had returned to the UK for a few weeks, and saw none of it live. I didn’t look at any scorecards or reports in advance of watching these repeats, so a lot of it came fresh, despite knowing the results.

There was more that surprised than might have been expected from the first whitewashed Ashes series since Warwick Armstrong. Five-nil suggests Australian dominance from first ball to last, but that’s not how it was. In every game England were in a good position at one time or another. At the Waca Australia were all out for 244 having won the toss. Margin of victory: 206 runs. At the MCG England were 101 for two before collapsing to 159; then they had Australia at 84 for five. Margin of loss: an innings and 99. At Sydney they were 166 for two. Margin of loss: ten wickets. Worst of all, in Adelaide how could they have lost from 551 for six declared batting first?

The Adelaide defeat was because England froze on the last day, the runs drying up like grapes in the sun. Had they made 30 more, but been out at the same time, the game would have been saved. Australia were better equipped to make sure that at the turning points the match went down the green-and-gold road. There was no shame in this for England as that Australian side was one of the finest test teams ever to play the game. They had four great players: Gilchrist, McGrath, Ponting and Warne, and a few more who weren’t far off.

For McGrath and Warne, it was last-chance-to-see, in test matches anyway. With the Ashes reclaimed at the earliest possible moment, the the Melbourne and Sydney tests became a royal progress celebrating the two great bowlers, and rightly so.

McGrath rarely ventured outside the 120s in terms of kph, and was not quite the force he once was; but he was still good enough as he showed by destroying England’s middle order in Sydney. He got the timing of his retirement exactly right, past the summit but before the downward slope got steep.

Warne might have carried on for years on this evidence. By this time, he was part spin bowler, part hypnotist and part PT Barnum. He certainly had a sense of theatre and the gift of timing: his 700th wicket was taken at Melbourne on Boxing Day and his 1000th in international cricket at Sydney in the New Year (though it seemed wrong to have him bowling defensively down the legside at Adelaide, like commissioning Canaletto to whitewash the ceiling).

The biggest difference between test cricket then and now was the absence of the DRS system. Over the series as a whole the umpiring was pretty good, but there were plenty of mistakes, and most of the critical ones went against England. Andrew Strauss copped a couple in Perth, caught behind off the thigh pad in the first innings and given lbw in the second for a duck off Lee, when the ball would have cleared the stumps as comfortably as a literary joke passing over the heads of the Barmy Army. Australians will make the point that, had the DRS been available in that era, it would have spotted that Michael Kasprowicz’s hand was off the bat at the climax of Edgbaston ’05, removing that series from the legendary category in a couple of frames.

Rudi Koertzen had a poor game at Melbourne. Hayden was stone-cold lbw against Hoggard twice in the same over early in his innings; Symonds was reprieved in the fifties. Both made 150s and put on 279 for the sixth wicket from 89 for five. That’s the biggest difference between then and now—putting up with poor decisions.

I’d forgotten about Koertzen’s self-indulgent manner of giving batsmen out, drawing the left arm from behind the back with cruel slowness; a man could be halfway back to the rooms before the finger was fully extended. In comparison, Billy Bowden’s crooked finger of fate appeared understated. Alim Dar also officiated, the only umpire from that time still on the international circuit (though Bowden still favours the domestic audience here with displays of his powers of rain divination, I am pleased to say).

Symonds achieved his maiden test hundred with a straight six off Collingwood. Reaching the landmark had taken him longer than expected and there was to be only one more century. I had the pleasure of seeing Symonds often when he came to play for Gloucestershire as a teenager, the most talented player of that age that I have seen. He had a good international record, with averages of 40 in both tests and 198 ODIs, yet there remains a feeling of what-might-have-been.

Symonds isn’t the only player who evokes that emotion in this series. Monty Panesar had been England’s leading test wicket taker in the 2006 season, but Ashley Giles was picked ahead of him for the first two tests of this series, continuing England’s long tradition of picking the lesser player in search of that elusive quality, balance (Giles had once been a worthy first choice, but that time had passed). As I write, somebody on Twitter is asking (out of genuine perplexity) how come Derek Pringle was ever picked for England.

Picked for the third test, Panesar finished second in the bowling averages, a fraction behind Hoggard, though the fact that they were both on 37 tells us much about the series. One of the commentators (I think Benaud, though it sounds a little acerbic for him) said that England had replaced a slow bowler with a spinner. They were critical of how Flintoff handled him at times. Ian Chappell said at Sydney that Panesar should introduce himself to his captain to remind him that his name was not Ashley Giles, and that Flintoff should stop setting fields as if he was.

Panesar was 24, and appeared set for a distinguished career. He finished with 167 wickets from 50 tests, which is not bad, but the exuberant, popular young man who bowled with such imagination and confidence here was capable of so much more. Of course, the emergence of Graeme Swann as a top-class spinner limited his opportunities, and he has faced some mental health issues bravely. At 38, he is two years younger than Jeetan Patel, and could have been mesmerising the best batsmen in the Championship still.

The biggest unexpected pleasure of rediscovering this series was the wicketkeeping of Chris Read, unexpected not because there is any doubt about Read’s quality, but because I had forgotten that he replaced Geraint Jones in the final two tests. Ian Healy said that Read’s was “the most convincing, efficient, technical display I’ve seen from an England keeper for 20 years”, and went on to say he was just as good as Alan Knott, which caused Bill Lawry to say “You’ve just made me fall off my chair”. Knott remains the gold standard of keeping for those who played with or against him, but the fact that the comparison is not fanciful is compliment enough.

Read never played test cricket again. Utility, in the form of Matt Prior, was preferred over beauty. Read continued in county cricket for another ten years, becoming, almost certainly, the last keeper to make more than a thousand first-class dismissals, and finishing with 27 centuries and a career average just a couple under Prior’s. That he did not have at least a hundred test caps is a scandal.

Coverage was from Channel Nine, close to its peak. In Richie Benaud and Ian Chappell they had two of the great commentators and the rest were more than the sum of their parts. They each had a distinctive voice and style, from Mark Nicholas’s plumed hat to Bill Lawry’s excited-falsetto. Nicholas spent much of the first test explaining the innovation of Hot Spot in the manner of someone introducing fire to the Neanderthals. In Nine’s final years, it was difficult to tell which of Clarke, Hussey, Lee and Brayshaw was at the microphone; they weren’t bad commentators, but they all sounded much the same. The common criticism that they looked at the game as if every day were Australia Day could not be levelled in 2006/07, it being difficult to over-praise a team that won five-nil.

Finally, what of Andrew Flintoff? The memory, and a superficial look at the numbers, says that his captaincy was a disaster from first to last. As ever, the reality was more complex. The commentators were quite impressed early on, at least in terms of setting an example and leading from the front. His handling of Panesar was astute when the spinner returned to the side in Perth. Many captains would have pulled Panesar out of the attack when Symonds took him for 17 in an over, but Flintoff showed confidence in a bowler who went on to take only the third five-for by a spinner in a Waca test. But the captain’s self-belief waned with each missed opportunity. It was that Hayden/Symonds partnership at the MCG that finally brought him down like a slaver’s statue. From that time on, he had the crestfallen look of a man who knew that there was a pedalo out there, waiting for him.