Triumphs overseas as the season begins at home

Wellington v Canterbury, Ford Trophy

The first day of the season. A day of optimism and excitement for summer days to come; for the older spectators, of relief at having made it through another winter; and often of hot soup and overcoats. When I was last at the cricket, at St Lawrence in April, there were legs of lamb in the kitchen freezer that were warmer than my Blean correspondent and myself. So it was pleasant to find the Basin Reserve warm and windless, spectators able to sit outside in the RA Vance Stand without a sweater. If there is a better day to watch cricket this side of the New Year, we will be fortunate.

My Petone and Brooklyn correspondents have been occupying the same front row seats on the upper deck of the RA Vance Stand for several decades. We refer to it as the Royal Box. There was a crisis at the Australia test match earlier this year when NZ Cricket reserved the seats for dignitaries, forcing a move further up the stand. 

On the first day of the new season there was a shattering discovery. New sightscreens have been installed at both ends of the Basin. They are wider and, crucially, higher. On days where it is directly in line with the pitch, almost a third of the field is not now visible from the Royal Box. If a really quick bowler operates from the southern end it is possible that the slips would be obscured from view. Nevertheless, I was staggered, on arrival at the next game, to find that my Petone correspondent had moved back to the second row. The most apposite historical analogy that captures the magnitude of this shift that I can think of is Pope Clement V’s moving the papacy from Rome to Avignon in 1309.

 

The cause is the exponential growth of sightscreens through the years. I have been watching highlights of ODIs in Australia in the eighties and was reminded that screens in that era were often little wider than the pitch itself. Now, the screen itself is often merely the centrepiece of an installation that covers whole blocks of seats. Still batters are distracted by movement of flies at the edge of the construction. One day the screens at either end will meet on the mid-wicket boundaries, thus removing the inconvenience of providing accommodation for spectators altogether. 

For the first time in a while the opener was not the Plunket Shield, but the 50-over competition, the first four rounds of which precede the first-class fixtures. Wellington were at home to Canterbury, the reigning champions. 

The pitch was yellow-brown rather than the customary green, but there was a fair bit of early-season movement as Wellington opener Tim Robinson discovered when he edged the second ball of the match to second slip. Greenwood and Johnson put on 58 for the second wicket, but with a caution that suggested that a score of 250 or fewer would be enough. Wellington’s 129, with almost ten overs unused, was certainly not.

The collapse was begun by a splendid tumbling catch at deep mid-off by Canterbury skipper Cole McConchie to get rid of Greenwood. That was the first of a career-best five for 14 for Angus Mackenzie, who is barely on the brisk side of medium pace. It was a reward for competence rather than menace; he will often bowl as well without taking a wicket. Poor shot selection or execution helped him, Nick Kelly’s belated attempt to withdraw his bat from the  first ball he received being a prime example. 

Henry Nicholls was the first Canterbury batter to go, at 44 and the loss of three more for 20 gave Wellington hope, but Chad Bowes and Matthew Boyle took them home in the 23rd over without further loss. This was a circumspect Bowes, 48 from 49 deliveries. Later in the week he made the fastest double hundred in List A history. 

The day got better. Indeed, Sunday 20 October 2024 goes down as one of the most memorable in New Zealand’s cricketing story. The early finish at the Basin allowed us to get home in time for the first ball in Bengaluru, where New Zealand were chasing 107 for their first test victory in India in 36 years. Even more remarkably, this victory was followed by another at Pune that gave New Zealand a first series win in India, the first there by any team for 12 years. 

Then, still on Sunday in Dubai, the New Zealand women won the T20 World Cup by beating South Africa, rather easily, in the final. Both these triumphs were utterly unexpected. We in the south Pacific are all as surprised as everyone else.

The men played two tests at Galle in Sri Lanka a few weeks before going to India. Both were lost, the first honourably, falling 63 short of a target of 275,  the second catastrophically, replying to Sri Lanka’s 602 for five declared with 88 all out. They looked a shambles in the field too, as poor a performance in this respect as I could recall. 

Three weeks later they bowled India out for 46 in the first innings and won by eight wickets. How could this be? There was a change of captain. Tim Southee never looked at ease in the role, and has increasingly questionable value as a bowler. Tom Latham, effectively sacked when Kane Williamson stepped aside, given that he had led the team as much as Williamson in the previous two years or so, becomes the official skipper. Selecting the best bowler helps. Matt Henry was mysteriously omitted in Sri Lanka. He took eight wickets in Bengaluru. 

Henry was injured for the second test, where we expected India to put the world back on its axis on a pitch expected to turn like a cornered cat. It did, and Mitch Santner took 13 wickets to win the game. Santner has become one of the foremost slow bowlers in shorter forms, but that is how he has been best described; a slow bowler, not a spinner. Now he was Hedley Verity reinvented. An explanation is beyond me. I just delight in the cricket of it. 

The World Cup win was every bit as unexpected as the strange events in India. The White Ferns (ironically named given that they have not played a test match since 2003) had lost ten T20 internationals on the trot before the competition, all to either England or Australia. None of those games were close. Before that there was a series loss at home to Pakistan, a team years behind New Zealand in terms of coaching and finance. 

In the World Cup, they lost a group game to Australia, but were otherwise untroubled. Both nemeses, Australia and England, carelessly allowed themselves to be eliminated before facing the Kiwis in the knock-out stage, which helped.

What both unexpected triumphs had in common was the excellence of a Wellington player at their centre. I have been lauding Rachin Ravindra and Amelia Kerr since they first appeared for Wellington. In both cases, it took no special insight to discern their class. Ravindra had so much time, and Kerr astonishing control mixed with the ability to turn the ball both ways. Here, she was the leading wicket taker, made runs when they were most needed and was player of the tournament by a distance. Ravindra’s first innings 139 had the commentators in ecstasy at its class. In the second, he made batting look easy, when it had appeared anything but. One of cricket’s delights is spotting a good one early and watching them grow. 

It has been almost six months since I last posted, as long an interval as there has been since My Life in Cricket Scorecards was inaugurated in 2009. This was mainly a question of time. I have chosen to interpret the turfing out of the Labour Government here in New Zealand at last October’s election as the voters expressing a wish that I spend more time at the Basin Reserve, and have reduced my hours working in Parliament, creating a bit of space for writing, so more soon, hopefully.

Retirement and age mean that, despite having not lived there since 1997, I have to deal with officialdom in the UK. How you people over there get anything done, I just don’t know. I received a letter from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs telling me that I was due a refund on tax paid on my UK teacher’s pension, and that a cheque would arrive soon. 

I can tell that you have questions. In answer to that of younger readers, a cheque is how they paid for things in black-and-white films. And to the next, no, I don’t understand why they didn’t put the cheque in that envelope, rather than in another one two weeks later either. The currency, you ask? UK Sterling, making it unbankable in New Zealand. I could have asked that the money be paid direct into a UK bank account by stating as much on my tax return, had I been required to make one, which I was not. And I couldn’t use the website as I don’t have a UK postcode, so it wouldn’t let me register. I have a mental picture of HMRC officials wearing frock coats and sitting on high stools, quills in hand.

HSBC were easier to contact and much more helpful, but couldn’t accept a scanned copy of the cheque, so instructed that I should send it to them, with a paying-in slip, which they would send me, given that I had remissfully not equipped myself with one, not having paid a cheque into a UK account in the current millennium. Thus, in the era of AI, two bits of paper made their way halfway across the world, and back again. By the way, there is no windfall here. My role is merely that of intermediary between the tax authorities of both countries.

I have to say, as an infrequent visitor, that life in the UK seems, in most respects, to be a bit more complicated than it needs to be. When I was planning a day at Lord’s in May, I discovered the 21 steps that the Middlesex website makes the potential spectator go through to purchase a ticket. It was something of a relief that it rained. 

Summer days at the T20

The first-class season in New Zealand used to begin at Christmas, sometimes on Christmas Day itself, which must have been the cause of tense negotiations in households across the country. Now the tinsel and reindeer bring with them the start of the domestic T20. I watched the opener at the Basin Reserve on Christmas Eve on television, and was at the ground for the remaining four home rounds of the round robin, and for the finals. 

One of the problems with T20 is that it does not offer a whole day at the cricket. There is barely time to put away a third scotch egg before stumps are pulled and you’re back on the bus. New Zealand Cricket have put this right by staging the domestic T20 as double headers, with a women’s and men’s game together offering a full day’s play, or at least the overs equivalent of a Sunday League game. 

In those distant times they managed to get through 80 overs in well under five hours of playing time rather than the six-plus it now takes. The biggest reason for this is that captains find it as irresistible to pick at their fields as does an infant its nose, often preceded by a conference that starts with the agreement of the minutes to the last one. So what about—either as an imposition once the over-rate falls below a proscribed level, or as standard practice—saying that the field set at the start of an over stays in place for the whole over, unless a left-hander replaces a right-hander on strike (or vice versa)? A harsher variant might be that captains submit a standard field at the start of the game and have to revert to that if they don’t get on with it. 

Both Wellington teams started the competition as reigning champions. The men have gone from strength-to-strength, and this year lost only away to Canterbury during the ten-game preliminary stage. Wellington supporters are doing a reasonable impression of the meek on the day when the title deeds to the Earth finally drop through the letter box. The women have experienced a levelling-up in the standard of competition. Last year they were unbeaten; this, they finished only third in the group stage and hosted the final because TV wanted it on the same ground as the men’s rather than on merit. 

Sophie Devine missed the early games but was devastating when she returned, starting with 108 from 38 balls in a total of 131 in a ten-wicket win away to Otago, followed by 59 off 26 in Christchurch. Her first appearance at the Basin, in the return against Otago, she made 80 from 44 and put on 110 for the second wicket with Melie Kerr. 

A young boy of about nine years of age who, when asked by a TV reporter if Finn Allen (see later) should be in the Black Caps squad replied that he judged Allen “not better than Sophie Devine, but still pretty good”, the quote of the season so far. It reflected not only the growing profile of women’s cricket here, but also how fortunate we are here in New Zealand, in these alarming times, to be so short of material to fill the news hour that we resort to seeking the opinions of primary schoolkids on the selection of national sports teams. 

Wellington’s women are the best fielding side in the competition, but when a Wellington player made a fielding error in a televised game, one of commentators said that the fielding was “not what you expect from a professional”. The excellent Frankie Mackay reminded him that there were only two professionals—Kerr and Devine—in the team. 

Mackay—also captain of Canterbury—is a prime example of a general truth that when a woman commentator comes to the microphone the average IQ in the commentary box increases significantly. This is never more true than on the Fox Sports coverage in Australia, which rarely rises above the level of tiresome banter other than when Isa Guha is there to guide and coax the boys into saying something intelligent about the cricket. Mackay is a librarian. When asked how many books she had read in 2020 she replied that it had been a busy year, so the total was a below-average 70. The incredulous response of her co-commentator suggested that he didn’t know that there were that many books in the world.

The aforementioned Finn Allen moved to Wellington from Auckland last year. In the early-season Plunket Shield games he could hardly put bat to ball and was dropped for the final match of the opening half of the programme. Restored for the shorter forms, he scored more runs than anybody else in the T20 competition (512), at the third-highest strike rate, with most fours and sixes. If he gets beyond single figures his innings explodes like a violation of the Test Ban Treaty. He combines timing and power in a way that is often spectacular. Alex Hales or Jason Roy might be playalikes in England. 

Against Central Districts, chasing 164, he reached his fifty in just 16 balls. This was the quickest half century I had seen since Matthew Fleming got one from the same number in a Sunday League game reduced by rain to ten overs for Kent against Yorkshire at Canterbury in 1996. Hearing that the game was soon to start, I hurried to the ground with my son, then aged eight. He was impressed. A couple of weeks later, we watched on TV as Sachin Tendulkar made an elegant century in a test match. He reached fifty in a little over a run-a-ball. “That’s four times slower than Matthew Fleming” said the boy, lifting the bar too high in a trice for any of the game’s subsequent great players to clear.

The second-highest T20 aggregate was Devon Conway’s, and his opening partnership with Allen goes much of the way towards accounting for Wellington’s success. One uses the power of a jack hammer, the other the finesse of the dentist’s drill. Conway has already been successful in the national T20 team, and would have walked straight into the test team in any other era. Expect to see him there in England in June.

The only loss that Wellington experienced in the home preliminaries was that of the women to Canterbury, thanks to the batting of Amy Satterthwaite, whose unbeaten 71 took the South Islanders to a nine-wicket win. Satterthwaite is Devine’s only contender as New Zealand’s best woman batter. The comparison is like that between the power and forcefulness of Graham Gooch and the elegance and security of Graham Thorpe. Like Thorpe, Satterthwaite is a left-hander, a rare thing among women cricketers here. Why this should be, and why there are more left-handers in the men’s game than there used to be, is a puzzle. Something to do with how they are coached when very young, perhaps. 

So to the finals, with Canterbury the visitors for both games. The women’s match was very entertaining. Three times, Wellington looked well on the way to victory, only for the game to turn on them. The first was when they were 100 for one, with Devine still there, slightly subdued but ready to press on the pedal for the final six overs of the innings until she was bowled by Melissa Banks, the first of seven wickets to fall for just 25 runs.

Satterthwaite’s loopy off spin accounted for three of the wickets, with three more falling to run outs, the best of which was a direct hit by eagle-eye Mackay. But that was the sum of Satterthwaite’s contribution; she was second out, for a duck. Melie Kerr’s hattrick, as previously reported, then reduced Canterbury to 40 for five, which became 60 for six with seven-and-a-half overs left.

Lea Tahuhu joined Kate Ebrahim. From that point, only four deliveries were not scored from. The shot selection of both players was exceptional, Ebrahim working the ball around while Tahuhu supplied the power, with two sixes off Jess Kerr in the 17th over. Six came from the next over, so 19 were needed from the last two. 

Only singles from the first three balls of the 19th, bowled by Devine. Wellington were back ahead, decisively we thought. But Ebrahim hit the next two deliveries to the boundary, one flicked to mid-wicket, the other lifted to the vacant third man. Ebrahim should have been run out off the last ball of that over, but Devine missed the stumps from four metres away. The Wellington fielding got a bit shaky as the game got more tense. Still, nine were needed from the last, bowled by Kasperek. 

Tahuhu charged the second ball of the over, sending it back over the bowler’s head to the straight boundary. Two more singles and the game was Canterbury’s, with two balls to spare. The rest of the Canterbury team rushed onto the field, first encircling Ebrahim. Satterthwaite broke away and rushed to Tahuhu, to whom she is married and with whom she had reversed roles today, batsman and bowler. Their embrace was as emotional a thing as I have seen on a cricket field for some time, sharpened by the appearance soon after of their one-year-old daughter. 

The men’s game was every bit as tense without quite as many giddy twists and turns. Canterbury batted first and for the first half of their innings made it look easy. At 106 for two in the twelfth, 200 looked probable. 

Wellington’s spinners, Bracewell and Younghusband (though slow bowler would be a truer representation of the former’s oeuvre), intervened decisively, gouging out Canterbury’s middle order and damming the flow of runs. Some end-of-innings biffing by Shipley took Canterbury to 175, fewer than they should have got, but still a challenge. There was some exceptional catching by Wellington. 

If Allen got going, it would be a cinch, but the tension of the final knocked his timing off, and he went for 16 off (by his standards) a dawdling ten deliveries. When Blundell was caught first ball by the diving Bowes at backward point, the tide of pessimism, never far from these shores, seemed about to engulf the local faithful. 

Devon Conway is one of those rare batsmen who goes about his job in the same way in all forms of cricket. The speed of scoring quickens to fit the format, but the foundation of judgement, temperament and, above all, technique is what his game is built on no matter what the context. 

As usual, it would have taken a while for the observer to discern what form of cricket was being played if the only evidence available to them was Conway’s batting. No chance of making runs was spurned and his risks were calculated, apparently to several decimal places. He paced his innings superbly, though he knew this better than most supporters when 29 were required from the last three overs, 15 from the final nine balls. 

Successive fours off the next two deliveries were executed as if they had been in Conway's diary for months. Another, his eleventh (just the one six today, more evidence of Conway's actuarial approach to batting) completed a five-wicket win with two balls to spare.

The Basin was fairly full for both finals, and, like last year, it was the family occasion that T20 competitions are said to enable, but, in some parts of the world, rarely do. T20’s limitations are well-known, but it can still provide a good day at the cricket, as it did here at a time when going to any cricket is a privilege.

Men’s final scorecard

Women’s final scorecard

 

Hat tricks I have seen No 9

Amelia Kerr for Wellington v Canterbury, T20 Final, Basin Reserve, 13 February 2021

After a twenty-year wait between hattricks Nos 7 and 8, No 9 came along a mere 13 months later. It was distinctive among my collection of hattricks in several ways. It was the first by a woman cricketer, the first by a leg spinner, the first in a final and the first to be all bowled (indeed, the first where all three victims fell in the same manner).

Melie Kerr’s cricketing pedigree is as distinguished as any in New Zealand, including the Hadlees and the Bracewells. Her sister Jess was alongside her in the Wellington team here, as she will be in the national team in the forthcoming series against Australia. Both her parents, Robbie and Jo, were Wellington representatives. Robbie played as a batsman and sometime keeper 59 times in the 90s, mostly in one-day cricket.

Her grandfather Bruce Murray (often known as “Bag” because of his initials—BAG Murray) played 13 tests as an opener from 1969 to 1972. He played in the first test I ever watched, at the Oval in 1969, though I don’t think that I saw him bat on that day.

The family trade is teaching. Bruce Murray was a high-school principal for 20 years. Jess has just started as an intermediate school teacher (11–13 year olds) and Melie, according to Wikipedia, works as a teacher aide, supporting autistic children.

Watching Melie Kerr bowl leg spin has become one of the delights of the Wellington summer. She has great accuracy and turns it both ways. She also holds the record for the highest individual score in women’s ODI cricket (232 against Ireland). She is 20.

The game was the T20 final between Wellington and Canterbury. At 40 for two in the tenth over chasing 125, Canterbury needed to increase their scoring rate urgently.

The dangerous Amy Satterthwaite was already out, but captain Frankie Mackay was still there. She tried to sweep the third ball of Kerr’s second over. It was a googly, but she was beaten through the air rather than off the pitch and was bowled off stump.

The next delivery was another wrong’un, which Kirsty Nation failed to read, going back with room to play a desperate prod at the ball as it followed her. Top of off, again.

Emma Kench played a similar shot to the hattrick delivery, which went on quicker rather than turning. Kerr was, for a couple of seconds, the only person in the ground who did not know that the ball had again found its way to the top of the off stump, and was undertaking an operatic appeal for leg before when a swarm of teammates put her right.

There was nobody in the ground who thought that this was anything other than a match-winning piece of bowling, except the non-striking batter Kate Ebrahim, and No 8 Leah Tahuhu. Their thrilling partnership of 66 in six overs deprived Wellington of a fourth successive T20 trophy. More of that soon.

 

Double T20 triumph for Wellington

Women’s 2020 T20 Final

Men’s 2020 T20 Final

Forty-two years had passed since I last saw my team win a domestic one-day final, on that happy but drab day when Kent beat Derbyshire over 55 overs. Though I returned to Lord’s with Kent on six further occasions (to be related in future editions of the continuing but occasional series on Lord’s Finals That I Have Seen) all of them were defeats.

It might be thought to be a bit of a stretch to call Wellington “my team”. For nine years Northern Districts were my New Zealand team, when I lived the Bay of Plenty, but I have sat in the teeth of the southerly at the Basin Reserve these fourteen summers now, so claim freeholder privileges. My long wait was rewarded with two wins in one afternoon, as both the Wellington women and men won their finals.

Here in New Zealand finals are played at the home ground of the team that wins the league stage of the competition (except when the venue has been booked for another event, which was what happened to deprive Wellington of the staging rights for the final three years ago—this only happens in Wellington). The women’s game had been scheduled for Saturday and the men’s for Sunday, but the sensible decision was made to delay the former and to stage the two matches as a double-header.

Even better, spectators were offered free admission if they arrived before 2 pm, about scheduled mid-innings in the women’s game. This ensured a good crowd for both fixtures. I haven’t seen the RA Vance Stand as full for a long time. What’s more, there were plenty of young people, girls especially, there for a first taste of the Basin on a big day. It brought families to the cricket, something that we are often told is the point of the shortest forms, but rarely seems to result, particularly in England where finals day at Edgbaston looks like one of Hogarth’s more graphic depictions of human depravity.

It’s been a funny summer in Wellington. Much of the rest of the country has sweltered while we often find ourselves shrouded in low cloud, temperatures ten degrees lower than they are less than an hour away. This was such a day. With the strong breeze making the mist dance across the field we half expected Catherine Earnshaw to emerge from the gloom to open the bowling from the Southern End.

There was sufficient moisture with it to delay the start, truncating the women’s game to seven overs a side. The fewer overs there are in a cricket match, the more of a lottery it becomes. Wellington had won all their ten games in the round-robin stage, so it would have been an outrage had the weather cost them the title. Put in by Auckland, Wellington and New Zealand captain Sophie Devine ensured that was not going to happen with a commanding 54 off 23 balls including five sixes, all straight and all but one clearing the men’s boundary as well as the women’s. Some people (or rather some men) believe this to be significant, but I’m not among them. That the women’s T20 relies less on pure power than the men’s makes it more of an all-round display of cricket skills.

Wellington’s 81 for two was well beyond Auckland’s powers. Wickets fell regularly to Wellington’s bowlers who were much tighter, particularly Amelia Kerr, whose two overs conceded only nine runs. Watching Kerr bowling leg spin is one of the highlights of the contemporary New Zealand season.

Four of the players in the men’s game—Blundell, Phillips, Somerville and test twelfth man Jamieson—I had last seen in Sydney a couple of weeks previously. At least here they could be sure that the fog on the surrounding hills did not contain smoke particles. I watched from the warmth of the Long Room.

As in the women’s game, Auckland won the toss and put Wellington in. T20 games are often like those TV cooking shows where contestants have to concoct something tasty, or at least adequate, from supplied ingredients, small quantities combining to make something tasty. Here, as usual, the hero of the dish (we watch plenty of these programmes, so have absorbed their distinctive vocabulary) was Devon Conway. He is the leading scorer in all three forms this season, and by such margins that, as Peter Bromley said of Shergar’s Derby win, you’d need a telescope to see the rest. The analogy is appropriate as Conway will shortly disappear, from Wellington colours at least. He qualifies for New Zealand selection in a few months’ time, and will be in the team for all forms, without a doubt. His 49 here was one of his more modest efforts, but was comfortably top score. A spectacular catch at short extra cover ended his innings, taken by Auckland captain Craig Cachopa, the last surviving member of the band of small but perfectly formed Cachopii brothers, represented, it seemed, in every provincial team just a few years ago.

Conway and Blundell put on 60 for the third wicket, after which there was something of a collapse, with five wickets falling for 40. Michael Bracewell and Logan van Beek brought some relief to Wellington supporters with an unbeaten stand of 33 in three overs, 20 of which came from the final over.

Nevertheless, a look at the scoreboard where Auckland’s batting order was listed meant that none of us were confident that 168 was enough. Guptill, Munro and Phillips are as destructive a top three as there is in any T20 competition. In a group match just the week before, Wellington had removed these three for 33 and thought the game over, only for Chapman and Cachopa to take it away with a partnership of 132.

Guptill and Munro were well on the way to giving the innings the necessary launching pad, causing the collective blood pressure in the Long Room to climb like the Saturn V, when Munro was given out caught behind off Bennett. Note the “given” in that last sentence, necessary to render it an accurate representation of events. Thinking their decision-making impaired by the cold, the umpires referred the decision to their warmer colleague in the stands. No snicko or hotspot was available, and the replays, did not seem definitive. But out was the decision, so Munro was sent on his way, complaining until he left the field. The usually phlegmatic Guptill was moved to debate the issue with the officials. The Auckland innings did not recover from this injustice. Wickets fell regularly; Guptill apart, only Cachopa reached double figures.

The trail of batsmen to and from the rooms muted Guptill’s aggression. His 60 came from as many as 53 balls, but while he was there the game was always just a few blows from being Auckland’s. The 22-run margin of victory makes it look a stroll in the park, but it seemed to anxious Wellingtonians more a barefooted marathon on hot coals.

I always relish the star player in a final being someone who does not experience the international limelight, for whom this is the biggest of days. Here, that was Logan van Beek. Without the runs that he and Bracewell bludgeoned at the end of the innings, Wellington would not have had a defendable total. He took the wickets of Cachopa, O’Donnell and Hira in five balls in the fifteenth and seventeenth overs.

In the following over he was waiting on the deep mid-wicket boundary the direction in which Guptill hit what looked like a six. Van Beek stretched to take the catch while balancing on an invisible tightrope just a couple of inches inside the boundary. He tossed the ball up before he stepped out of the field of play, reclaiming the ball on his return.

Not much more than a decade ago, such a catch would have been considered extraordinary, but now they are commonplace, as van Beek proved by repeating the trick two balls later to dismiss Horne. An over later, coming in from cover boundary, van Beek sent in a perfect throw to run out McClenaghan, so he had a hand in six of the nine wickets that fell.

Had you told me, as I watched Alan Ealham raise the trophy at Lord’s in 1978, that I would wait 42 years to next see my team win a one-day final, and that when I did it would be half the world away and that the captain’s name would be Sophie Devine, I wouldn’t have believed you.

Back at Hamilton: leg spin and an inflatable pub

Northern Districts v Wellington, T20, Seddon Park, 22 December 2018

Scorecard (contains video links of wickets, boundaries and beards).

For the first time since I moved to Wellington in 2006, I have been to the cricket at Seddon Park in Hamilton. I was a regular in the press box there for three years or so from the turn of the century as CricInfo’s man in the central North Island, and reported upon a good deal of interesting cricket while enjoying Northern Districts’ free lunches.

At that time the ground was newly remodelled to double the size of the banking that surrounds two-thirds or so of the playing area, so as to attract more international fixtures. This involved taking out the trees that formed a near continuous canopy around the top of the bank when I first went to Seddon Park twenty years ago. It was pleasing to see that their replacements have matured, returning the rural feel that the ground has despite its central-city location (as I have noted previously, it is the only ground I have spectated at where I have been able to get a haircut and sit-down meal and still been back in my seat for the first ball after lunch). As well as the bouncy castle, without which no T20 match can be played, there was also an inflatable pub.

It was a pleasure to watch under lights in a part of the country where the climate does not necessitate an overcoat, several sweaters and a balaclava to survive the experience. Flags were given to spectators on arrival rather than the thermal blankets that are more appropriate in Wellington. 

The occasion was the opening game of the domestic T20 season, with Northern Districts hosting Wellington. A pleasing scheduling development this year is that many games are double headers, with the men’s match preceded by a women’s game. I arrived in time to catch the last ten overs of so of ND’s innings. Chasing 144, ND were well-placed with 60 or so needed and eight wickets standing, but they collapsed like the morale of the turkey population at this time of year, losing seven wickets for 23 runs.

Amelia Kerr was playing for Wellington. Recently turned 18, in June she broke the women’s world ODI record for an individual with 232 against Ireland. Good judges say that she is a rare talent, and I look forward to seeing her bat. Today it was her bowling that took the eye. She took three for ten with her leg spin, inducing cluelessness in the opposition as only a good leg spinner can. The last time I saw a leggie do that was when Ish Sodhi ran through Wellington at the Basin earlier this year. Though in the other camp, he greeted her with warm approval after the match, the fellowship of the wrist-spinner’s union overriding team loyalty. The ND lower order may not be technically equipped to meet the challenge, but a bowler who lands it with consistent accuracy and turns it both ways with bounce as Kerr does, will bamboozle better players than them.

In the men’s match, Wellington won the toss and put ND in. On a good pitch for batting, as Seddon Park is, I remain of the opinion that it is better to bat first as the pressure of chasing a large total undoes a team so often. That is, more or less, what happened here.

Though Walker wasn’t in the home side here, the other two bearded crowned heads were, and it turned out to be a royalist triumph, though it did not seem that way when Devcich was forced to abdicate from the second ball of the match, top edging Woodcock to short third man.

Devcich was replaced by his emperor-cousin Dean Brownlie who played the most substantial innings of the day, 99 from 45 balls, 76 of which came in boundaries. It was a satisfying combination of muscle and guile. One short of the hundred, Brownlie deserves credit for going for the big hit rather than taking the easy single that was there for the asking.

Each of the first five overs of the innings was delivered by a different bowler. The aim of this is to prevent the batsmen from settling, but it is a tactic that can be more disruptive to the bowlers. Woodcock, for example, bowled a fine first over, but was immediately replaced by Neesham, who was hit for four fours (though more athletic fielding might have turned two of them into catches). One of these was a cross-bat smash by Seifert that rocketed towards non-striker Brownlie at waist height. He just managed to straddle jump the oncoming missile. An inch higher and the line of succession would have been terminated there and then. When Woodcock returned, he got tonked too.

Jeetan Patel, who stepped aside from the domestic 50-over competition, is back for the T20 and made an immediate impact, conning the in-form Seifert to tap the first ball he bowled back for an easy caught-and-bowled. Only a single came from that over, but Patel’s effectiveness diminished with each over that he bowled. In his last over his normally infallible control went missing, and three full tosses all went over the rope, by a considerable margin. I felt sympathy for Patel earlier, when a clear mishit by Mitchell went for six, a sure sign of imbalance between bat and ball. Nofal also went for three sixes in one over, all by Brownlie.  

Hamish Bennett’s clever change of pace restricted ND to four from the last over of the innings, but 215 for six is a T20 total that will win many more games than it loses, even in Seddon Park’s corseted boundaries.

It was good to see Mitch Santner back for ND after being out for nine months with a knee injury. The national team lacks balance without him, and 22 not out and three overs for 28 was a satisfactory start.

Leading the reply, Devon Conway got off the mark with a six over long off in the first over off Devcich, followed by a four through mid-wicket next ball. He hit seven more fours, all pure shots through the off side. It was the best cricket of the match.

It is Conway’s second season for Wellington since moving from South Africa. Such is the way of the world that a televised 45 here set off social media in a way that a double hundred in the Plunket Shield a couple of weeks ago failed to do, with many asking when he will be qualified to play for New Zealand (to which the answer is September 2020).

But returning to the theme of leg spinners instigating self-doubt, the mere appearance of Ish Sodhi ball-in-hand caused Conway to abandon the composed orthodoxy that had served him so well to that point. Sodhi’s first ball he unsuccessfully attempted to reverse sweep. The second he charged at brainlessly and was bowled.

Four of Conway’s boundaries came in Scott Kuggeleijn’s first over, and things got no better for the bowler, who had a shocker. The tenth over of the innings included three wides as he kept getting the slow bouncer wrong. At least that over eventually reached a conclusion. Kuggeleijn’s final over included two above-waist full tosses so he was stood down with two balls of the over left. Paradoxically, he bowled more deliveries than anybody else in the game, wides and no balls included, finishing with 3.4-0-58-1.

However, it was Kuggeleijn’s dismissal of Hose, caught behind from the last ball of the tenth over, that sparked the collapse that gave the game to ND. At that point Wellington were more than halfway towards their target with seven wickets standing, so were still narrow favourites.

But Neesham went in the next over, miscuing Sodhi to cover. Sodhi isn’t always the most economical bowler, but gets the key batsmen out, which is why he is No 6 in the world bowling rankings for T20 at the time of writing. Any hope that Wellington had from this point on was expunged by the deceptively unlikely figure of Anton Devcich.

If asked to demonstrate to a young person the art of pie throwing, simply show them a video of Devcich bowling and the job will be done, or so anyone watching him bowl for the first time might be forgiven for thinking. Any indecision on the batsman’s part would be merely whether to hit him over midwicket or long off. But beware. Devcich is in the great tradition of bowlers who carry the appearance of a friendly spaniel but who can bite like a rottweiler. Chris Harris is the personification of the type, his ambling windmill action apparently doing no more than placing the ball on the tee, yet performing good enough a con to bring him 203 wickets in ODIs. Darren Stevens is another example. Devcich finished with four for 27. Wellington’s last six wickets fell for 12 runs.

One man’s misfortune is another’s opportunity. Much of Kuggeleijn’s waywardness was communicated to the world by Billy Bowden, making the most of a rare appearance before the TV cameras to reprise his full range of theatrical umpiring signals, a Christmas ham a few days early.