As Richie Benaud would have said, “Blundell; Tucker; Anderson the man to go”.
Thus ended the finest test match that most of us have
seen, a contest that joins Sydney 1894, Headingley 1981 and Kolkota 2001 as the
only test matches to be won by a team following on; and Adelaide 1993 in being
won by one run. One match on two of cricket’s most exclusive lists.
I was there (the three best words that anyone can write
about a great sporting fixture), for the whole match, but let us focus on the
extraordinary fifth day.
It began with England needing 210 more for victory with
nine wickets standing, a situation that we New Zealanders would have grabbed
thankfully had it been offered a day in advance, but which had become
disappointing after the home team lost its last five wickets for 28.
The man out at the end of the fourth day was Zak Crawley,
bowled through a gap big enough for a basketball. As a man of Kent I am naturally
pleased to see the old club have a presence in the England team, but supporters
of every county can propose a player or two who would have averaged more than
27 had they been given 33 tests. I’ll start: Darren Stevens. “James Hildreth”
sings out from the Quantocks and the Mendips, and so on.
Ollie Robinson is in the great tradition of Sussex
nightwatchmen inspired by Robin Marlar, apocryphally out second ball for six.
Robinson took a single off the first ball of the penultimate over of the fourth
day, so exposing Duckett, then attempted to put the ball over the Museum Stand before
the scheduled close.
It was therefore no surprise when, early on the final
day, Robinson scythed one in the air, finding Michael Bracewell under it.
Bracewell had been from triumph to disaster and was now
making the return journey. On the first day he took the best slip catch that
the Basin has seen in a long time, stretched full length parallel to the
ground, collecting the ball in his left hand at the second attempt to dismiss Duckett.
But on the fourth day, Bracewell became a national
villain when he was run out after omitting the most basic of cricketing protocols:
grounding his bat when completing a run. Only five more were added to the total
before New Zealand were all out, which left Bracewell’s face on the wanted
poster seeking the man responsible for England’s target being fifty or so fewer
than it might have been. What is more, he knew that, as the only spinner in the
team, he was carrying a nation’s expectations, despite having been a serious
bowler for only a couple of years.
Michael Bracewell had a good day, in the end.
It was when Ben Duckett was out six runs later,
flashing at one outside the off stump off Henry, that we took the first
tentative shuffle towards the edge of our seats. These days, whenever an
English batter gets out to a shot that has not been in the MCC Coaching Book
since Gladstone was prime minister, cynics are inclined to point to the moral failings
of what, for convenience, we will call Bazball. This despite McCullum being
responsible for reviving England’s test team from the frightened, failed state
it was in less than a year ago. In fact, England’s approach to the chase was
pretty conventional.
Tom Blundell took the catch. Second-highest scorer in
both innings here, he has conducted more rescue operations in the past year
than the average lifeboat crew. For once, he came in with what appeared to be a
decent score on the board, 297 for five, but take the deficit into account and
it was 71 for five, so it was carry on as normal. In England’s second innings,
Blundell stood up to the quick bowlers more than I have seen any keeper do, and
he did it superbly, like Godfrey Evans standing up to Alec Bedser.
Blundell put on 158 with Kane Williamson. For much of
his career, you looked at the scoreboard 45 minutes after Williamson has come
in and saw that he had 35, but couldn’t remember how he got them. For the time
being he has lost this ability to accumulate by stealth, and here it was more
of a battle, but the longer it went on the more fluent he became on his way to
132. The memories that this match gave us.
On the boundary, Neil Wagner waited. He may have been
wondering if this was his last day as a test cricketer. England’s new,
aggressive mindset had cost him 311 runs from just 50 overs, the trademark
Wagner short-pitched delivery more of a threat to spectators on the boundary
than it was to the batters. He had lost a few kph, just enough to take the aces
out of the pack that he used to perform his trick that kidded his victims that
he was genuinely quick. He had become Boxer, the carthorse from Animal Farm, whose “work harder”
solution to every problem could no longer defy the advancing years.
Wagner came on first change. Ollie Pope swotted his
third ball to mid-wicket boundary, and it seemed we would have to look
elsewhere for our hero today. Confidence buttressed, Pope saw four more runs
coming from the last ball of the over and shaped to cut, but Wagner was telling
the old joke again. It was on Pope a tad quicker and a smidgen straighter than
he anticipated. Latham took a good catch at second slip. Eighty for four.
Joe Root and Harry Brook were now together, the most
reliable Yorkshire combo since Aunt Betty and puddings. Their first-innings
partnership of 302 for the fourth wicket was the best batting that any of us
had seen for a long time. Brook made 186 from 176 balls with a low level of
risk and a near-perfect match of shot to delivery. The perfection of his
placement suggested that he could earn a living threading needles.
In comparison to Brook, anything that might be said
about Root’s innings is at risk of damning him with faint praise. At any other
time in England’s test cricket history we would say that four an over, mostly
on the first day, was a remarkable rate of scoring. It was a perfectly judged
innings, and had New Zealand lost on the third or fourth day, as many of us
expected, we would have treasured the memory of this test match for the batting
of Root and Brook alone.
Root nudged the ball towards the gap between third slip
and gully and seemed to set off. Maybe he had forgotten that Blundell was standing
up to Southee, ready to collect Bracewell’s throw. It was Brook’s call, but it
must be hard to tell your hero “no”. He didn’t face a ball.
With 173 to get and five wickets standing, the game had
become New Zealand’s to win, but the combination of Root at his best and
Stokes, who loves a cocktail of tension and pressure, was as good as the cricket
world could offer in this situation.
A contact who spent time in the press box told us that
the English writers are calling Stokes “Brearley”, and not in a nice way. If
this is so they should be ashamed, so much has Stokes done for cricket in
general and England’s cricket in particular. One of the many narratives of the epic
story of this test match was that both Stokes (knee) and Henry (back) were
struggling with injuries and pain that should properly have seen them in the
dressing room attached to a small iceberg.
The tension and bottled-up emotion of the next three
hours was worthy of Le Carré at his best. Every ball came wrapped in hope and
fear, the balance for the home supporters ebbing away from the former until it seemed
all gone. Root, his judgement making Solomon look a dabbler in the art, took on
the role of run chaser and proceeded at close to a run a ball. He was harsh on
Bracewell in particular. Stokes, cast against type, was putting the emphasis on
defence, ready to take over the guns if Root went down.
Southee was most effective in keeping the scoring rate
down, and his effervescent first-innings 73 was critical in reducing the lead.
It will seem a surprising observation to say that a knock of 49 balls that
contained five fours and six sixes shows us (and ideally Southee himself) what
a dusting of contemplation can do. His shot selection was more spot-on than at
any time since his debut 77 in a lost cause at Napier in 2008, for which I was
also present.
I wanted Wagner back on earlier. Root and Stokes had
been reasonably respectful of him at the start of their partnership, as if they
had heard a particularly apposite sermon on the dangers of temptation. Bracewell
bowled admirably, but was always dependent on a batter’s error to take a
wicket, which did not succeed in doing.
We didn’t see Wagner in the attack again until the
target was below 60, and it seemed that our chance had gone. So depressed was
the general mood that some people who had left their city-centre offices at 80
for five were sufficiently desperate as to contemplate returning to them.
Perhaps the gloomy miasma reached and infected Stokes. He
took the fourth ball of Wagner’s first over back to be an invitation to disrupt
the traffic to the Mt Victoria tunnel, but, from somewhere, Wagner summoned
that extra bit of pace and up in the air it went, landing safely in the hands
of Latham at backward-square leg.
Astonishingly, Root fell for the same old trick in
Wagner’s next over, except that this one did not get up as much. Had the shot
gone as planned it would have broken the Museum Stand clock and Root would have
had his second hundred of the match, but instead it lobbed gently to Bracewell
at mid on.
With 55 needed and three wickets left, the arrival of
Stuart Broad at the crease was more likely to comfort the home, rather than the
visiting, supporters. I recently re-read my unflattering view of Broad’s
batting in the World Cup match between these teams in 2015, and thought it
harsh (I compared his thinking to that of the local ovine population, to their
benefit). Yet here he approached his task just as New Zealand were expecting
and wanting, the only surprise being that it took him as long as nine balls to
shovel a catch to deep third where, inevitably, Wagner was waiting. It needs to
be said that it was a privilege to watch Broad and Anderson bowling together
one last time in New Zealand.
Foakes and Leach were together with 43 needed and only
Anderson to follow. Much of what happened in the remaining overs mystified me.
I have never understood why, with two wickets left to win the game, a team
would stop trying to get one of the incumbents out by conventional means,
instead setting fielders on the boundary and relying on the batter making a
mistake. But this, of all matches, is not in need of over-analysing.
Ben Foakes approached his task courageously and came so
close to winning the game, yet amateur selectors continue to contemplate an
England team without him. At the other end Jack Leach summoned the spirit of
Headingley ’19 to give resolute support. The closer the target got, the bolder
Foakes became. A pull to the mid-wicket boundary would have been caught by
Bracewell, had he been on three metres further out. There was a no ball for
three fielders behind square on the onside. Then were two successive fours off
Wagner, the first of which might have decapitated umpire Tucker.
On and off the field, New Zealanders were struggling to
hold their nerve as we counted the target down. Again, it appeared that all
hope was lost. We were Tom Hanks, waiting to die on the raft in Castaway, all hope gone.
For the third time within the hour an English batter became
over ambitious. With seven needed Foakes went for the big shot off Southee only
to find the top edge. One of the best moments of spectating is when you follow
a ball through the air and work out where it is going to fall. From my position
high in the RA Vance Stand I could see that it would land about five metres
inside the rope at fine leg, but that part of the boundary was obscured by
television camera scaffolding, so I only at the last moment did I see Neil
Wagner emerge, and throw himself towards the ball to take the catch. No
possibility of drama on this day was omitted from its narrative.
In came Jimmy Anderson. Of course. That would be the
story here, Anderson hitting the winning run. His clubbed four through mid on off
Wagner to put England a single away from a tie supported this interpretation.
The next seven deliveries each encompassed the torment,
guilt and despair of its own deadly sin. The fifth ball of Southee’s over was
especially taxing as Leach made his only attempt to score in the over, stopped
– just – by a diving Henry at mid on.
Then: Blundell; Tucker; Anderson the man to go, and it
was done.
My Brooklyn correspondent, a man only a little younger
than me, hurdled two chairs in the Long Room at the moment of victory. I myself
leapt high in the air, several times, an expression of joy from which I had
assumed myself to have retired in the late 1980s, but we all lost thirty years
for a minute or two.
Strangers embraced, linked forever in a moment. One of
the Basin regulars said that we would remember this day for the rest of our
lives, and so we will. Given the choice between recalling this day and my own
name, I will choose the former, with no hesitation at all.
Of all my days at the cricket, this was the best.
