The Currency of Centuries: Days 2 & 3 of the Second Test

 Scorecard

McCullum makes 302 to save a game that looked like it would be over in three days…Bangladesh lose after making 595 batting first…Sri Lanka lose after leading by 135 on first innings…New Zealand win by one run after following on. All these things have happened at the Basin Reserve in the last decade. It might be thought that we Basin regulars would have come to expect the unexpected, to retain hope to the last that the home team would find a hero who would find a white horse stabled in the RA Vance Stand and ride to the rescue. 

Yet, once Gus Atkinson had finished off the New Zealand first innings with his hat trick it never seemed that the last two days of the match were more than an administrative exercise, devoid of expectation or emotion. 

New Zealand soon gave up making serious attempts to get England’s batters out, leaving it up to Ben Stokes to choose how many New Zealand would be set. This figure turned out to be 583, and even before the second innings subsided to 59 for four there was not a person in the Basin who thought this remotely achievable. 

There were two nineties and two centuries during the phoney wars of the second innings. Hundreds are the gold standard of batting statistics, the accepted measure of true class. Witness the latest round of comparison of Kohli, Root, Smith and Williamson, which has focused more than anything on the number and frequency of three-figure scores. What transpired here questions the integrity of this currency. Are some centuries no more than a crypto scam in terms of what they tell us about the quality of the batting?

Joe Root scored 106, the third international century he has made in Wellington. The first was a run-a-ball 121 against Sri Lanka in the 2015 World Cup at the Cake Tin; the second a sublime unbeaten 153 in the Greatest Test of All at the Basin in 2023. Both were innings of immense quality, of a kind that are a warm, satisfied glow in the memory and leave a feeling of privilege at having been there to see them. 

This one,106 in 130 balls with 11 fours, did not have that status, and will not occupy much space in the memory, even in Root’s. A hundred devalued. Yet in its context it was perfect. It kept the score moving along at five an over, as much by exquisitely placed twos and threes as boundaries. It was not Root’s fault that the bowling was insipid. [As an aside, how we miss Neil Wagner, a man incapable of bowling in any situation without the intention of having ambassadors recalled.] Worth noting too that Root’s century here was the only one of the three to contribute to a win, which must have some sort of impact on the rate of exchange.

Tom Blundell has had a rough time of it lately. In India he broke double figures only once in five innings, and in Christchurch made 17 and nought followed by a scratchy 16 in the first innings here. The quality of his keeping has indicated a lowering of his confidence in general. I would have given one of the in-form keepers in domestic cricket a go here: Chu of Otago, Hay of Canterbury or Cleaver of Central Districts. 

In the second innings he made a hundred and reacted ecstatically to the achievement, as if it was paid out in gold doubloons. Were they the real thing? His 115 came from just 102 deliveries, with 13 fours and five sixes, four of which came off Shoaib Bashir, and with the help of a stiff northerly at Blundell’s back. Would Bashir have continued to bowl if the target had been for 250 fewer than it was? Almost certainly not. This was a work experience opportunity for him.

This century was similar to the one that he made on test debut against a dispirited West Indian attack. He was proud enough of that one to walk home in his batting gear, and so he should have been, just as his reaction to this one was right: it was a hundred in a test match. It secured his place in the team for the final test in Hamilton and quite probably beyond that. Is the money paid by this innings sufficient to buy that much? Or is it counterfeit?

The point should also be made that Blundell’s other three test centuries were made in the toughest of circumstances, at the MCG in the Boxing Day test; in England as New Zealand were being steamrolled by the novelty of Bazball; and last year at Mt Maunganui, one of countless rescue operations he has mounted to save a beleaguered batting performance. 

There were also two second-innings nineties, by Duckett and Bethall. I was glad that Bethall did not get to three figures. This sounds mean, but the intention is the opposite. It was predicted by many that the young Brummie-Bajan would be embarrassed by being pitched in at No 3 on debut. He was anything but, looking assured and proficient both technically and mentally. There will surely be centuries by the sackload to come, and he deserves the first to be glorious, made under the golden sun against top class bowling, not when kicking against a door blown open in a Wellington gale. 

New Zealand v England, 2nd Test, Basin Reserve, Wellington, 14–18 March 2013

http://www.espncricinfo.com/new-zealand-v-england-2013/engine/current/match/569244.html

A Basin Reserve Test between New Zealand and England must always be worthy of report. For us in the South Pacific it is the nearest we get to the G on Boxing Day, or the Ashes at Lord’s. But in truth the second Test was a touch mundane. I was there from lunch on the second day until the rain sluiced the game away on the fourth afternoon.

The encouraging performance in Dunedin had not done much to make us locals any more cheerful about New Zealand’s prospects. Five years ago a victory in Hamilton was quickly offset by a resounding loss here, and it was hard to find anybody who would stake more than a few cents on anything other than a repeat here. When I arrived, Trott and Compton had both departed having scored centuries in the manner of accountants totting up the petty cash.

Splendid achievement as any Test century is, I did not feel deprived on account of not being there to see them. A century by Compton is much like Christmas dinner. As enjoyable as one may be, you don’t feel like sitting through another one a week later. There remained a feeling that the New Zealand attack may have done the Australians an unintended favour (all favours done to Australians by New Zealanders are unintentional) in establishing Compton at the top of the order.

The immediate appeal when I burst through the CS Dempster Gate was that Pietersen was in. Purveyor of fifteen kinds of foolishness he may be, but Kevin Pietersen is a wonderful, innovative, unpredictable batsman who any cricketing cognoscente would want to watch. It was therefore disappointing when he tapped a catch to Fulton off Martin a few overs into the afternoon. That three of the top five fell to catches by Fulton at mid on/off suggests that some the English batsmen remained afflicted by the laxity that had been their downfall in the first innings in Dunedin. There were plenty of scornful remarks about Pietersen’s frequent absences from the field later in the game, but it turns out that he was struggling with the knee injury that kept him out of the Auckland Test and all cricket until the start of the Ashes series at the earliest.

Matt Prior provided the most watchable batting of the day—as he had in Dunedin and was to do in Auckland—bustling along to 82 at not far short of a run a ball. Around him there was subsidence, if not collapse, as the last seven wickets managed 198 between them from a starting point of 267 for three.

The Basin was close to full on Saturday for the most enjoyable day of the Test, even if it largely consisted of New Zealand’s futile attempt to avoid the follow on. Starting the day on 66 for three, the home side had to scratch together another 200, a target that should have been well within their ability on a pitch so friendly that had it been a Labrador it would have licked the batsmen on the chin. After the early loss of Williamson and Brownlie, McCullum and Watling put on a hundred before the captain was sixth out with 77 still needed to deprive Cook of the option to ask New Zealand to bat again.

Out strode Tim Southee, apparently having just finished his copy of Brain Dead Batting the Broad Way. Finn set a trap so obvious that the heffalump with the lowest IQ in the herd would have spotted it and taken avoiding action. Two men back on the boundary and a short ball almost at once. Southee obliged by hooking it straight to the squarer of the two. Watling and Martin (who batted capably again) took New Zealand to within 30 of the target, but Wagner and Boult could not survive long enough to reach it.

The top order was more assured in the second innings, reaching 162 for two by the time the rain brought an end to events on an episodic fourth day. There was no play, or even the remotest prospect of it, on the final day, which my Whiteladies Road correspondent spent in Te Papa, our excellent national museum on the Wellington waterfront.

The action on the field was not the totality of the Basin’s charms; I bought five books for $10 at the second-hand book stall, three by John Arlott. There was the great man’s account of the 1959 season and, more intriguingly, of the MCC tour of South Africa of 1948/9, which Arlott covered for the BBC. He returned imbued with a hatred of the racial divide that remained with him for the rest of his life. It will be interesting to see how much of this comes through in the book. There was a spin off from the TV series Arlott and Trueman On Cricket, which enlivened the Saturday mornings of my Blean correspondent and myself in the spring of ’75. Also two of cricket’s best-known autobiographies: Jim Laker’s Over To Me, which provoked Surrey to sack their greatest spin bowler; and Don Bradman’s end-of-career Farewell to Cricket.