Wellington v Central Districts, T20, Basin Reserve, 14 January 2018

Wellington v Central Districts, T20, Basin Reserve, 14 January 2018

Scorecard

This match was part of the last of ten rounds of the regular season domestic T20 in New Zealand (the Crash of Cash, I think it’s called), but the first game in the competition that I have been able to get to. The top three go through to the final phase with the table leader at home for the final. Second hosts third for the right to play them. At the start of the day the position was that the winner of this game would go through as third-placed team, provided that Canterbury lost against Northern Districts in Hamilton (which, as it turned out, they did). So this was a virtual quarter-final.

The cold spell that drove me indoors for the ODI last weekend was gone. It was a perfect summer’s day at the Basin, to be described by words that might have been expunged from the Wellington dictionary through lack of use: balmy, swelter, shimmer, parched, blue. In England there would have been a hack frying an egg on the pavement.

Central Districts won the toss and chose to bat. The first over gave us the rotund symmetry of Nottinghamshire’s Samit Patel bowling to Jesse Ryder. Ryder has been in glorious form this season, quite good enough to justify recall to the national team were it not that he carries enough baggage to fill the hold of the Queen Mary. He has such time and grace, Colin Cowdrey without the public schoolboy’s inhibitions.

He began with minimalist offside fours off two balls from van Beek that had nothing much wrong with them, followed by a kiss of a pull onto the bank for six. Best of all, off McPeake, a push that seemed not to have sufficient force to wake a baby, but which bisected two fielders stationed no more than ten metres apart square on the offside, luring them into a futile chase to the fence, so sweet was the timing. It was as good a shot as I will see all season.

A low-energy lightbulb expends more effort than Jesse. Not the least of his appeal is that he walks singles in T20, his own man to the end. He made 52, the game’s highest score, before being caught at deep square leg.

He had been well supported by George Worker in an opening stand of 96. Tom Bruce dominated the latter stages with a boisterous 46 from 20 deliveries. Central Districts finished on 194 for six, formidable certainly, but on a fast, true surface not insurmountable.

I would make two changes to the rules of T20. First, no six-over powerplay, when only two fielders are allowed outside the ring. In T20 there is no need for an incentive to attack; teams do it anyway. The powerplay just rewards mishits. Secondly, bowlers should be allowed five overs each, again to even up the imbalance between bat and ball just a little.

Captaincy in this form of the game is a mystery to me. Samit Patel conceded only two runs from that first over, but was taken off. Later Jeetan Patel took a wicket and had only a single scored from an over, but was removed. I realise that the idea is not to let the batsmen settle, but does the constant changing also stop bowlers from finding a rhythm.

Jeetan Patel was the outstanding bowler, with two for 23, with Samit Patel (25 off four overs) not far behind.

Wellington were in touch half way through their innings, keeping in touch with the Duckworth-Lewis par score. Tom Blundell made 30 from 19 and might have turned the game had he stayed in longer. But from the tenth to fifteenth over the game drifted away from them. Nothing much happened, but it was gone, apparently through negligence or merely forgetfulness.

Samit Patel was at the crease throughout this period. The thought occurred that such an experienced player could have done more to take control of the situation. Of course, runs cannot be conjured up from anywhere and Central Districts bowled very well through this period (even Blair Tickner, whose run up appears to be modelled on a man elbowing his way to the bar). But does a team have any business losing by 29 with five wickets left? Better to have a go, lose by 50 and be all out, I’d have thought.

The catching today was outstanding. Luke Ronchi, taking up the boundary patrol at a late stage in his career, dived forward at full length to dismiss Cleaver. Next ball, Ronchi’s successor behind the stumps, Tom Blundell, leapt high to his right to dismiss Bruce. Blundell himself went to a splendid diving catch by Seth Rance at short fine leg.

Wellington are New Zealand’s T20 champions no more.

Peak McPeake at the Basin

Wellington v Otago, 50 overs, Basin Reserve, 4 February 2017

Watching one-day cricket these days is akin to following the later career of Frank Sinatra. You think he’s done, but he makes another comeback and you are grateful for it, but the pleasure is tempered; you know that he will die one day soon.

In England the 50-over competition is to become an early-season event, best sponsored by a manufacturer of thermal foundation garments. And this is just a holding position before it becomes a means of occupying players who not good—or rather marketable—enough to get a city T20 contract.

Here in New Zealand we have our own ingenious methods of counter-marketing, the art of putting people off going to the cricket. The main stand at the Basin is currently out of commission, so there is no chance a seat behind the arm. The members’ lounge is open, but gaining admission to it has been a challenge worthy of one of those eighties game shows like The Krypton Factor or The Crystal Maze, such were the number of fences and locked doors placed in the path of the member thirsting for their complementary coffee.

On Wednesday for the Central Districts game, an added disincentive was the presence on the upper deck of three sinister figures clad in orange full-body suits complete with breathing masks. The sign reading “Danger asbestos removal in progress” was short on reassurance on a day when Wellington’s gale-force winds were in full voice.

Today, another refinement in spectator deterrence: the sign outside the ground advertising the fixture said that it was playing played on Sunday rather than Saturday, as was actually the case.

But the biggest weapon in spectator counter-insurgence is, of course, the Wellington weather. When the fixtures for this season were published, I looked forward to seeing all four of Wellington’s home games in this competition. How touchingly naïve. We all know that summer’s lease hath all too short a date, but even so, in Wellington it needs to get a decent lawyer to look at the small print.

The first of these games, against Auckland, was scheduled for a day on which Wellington appeared to be staging a city-wide performance of The Tempest. My Khandallah correspondent, who has flown into Wellington hundreds of times, ranked her landing that afternoon as the second-worst ever, on the basis that the plane made its way down a considerable portion of the runway at a perilous angle with only one wheel in contact with the ground. Abandoned without a ball bowled.

The second, against Canterbury, began in mid-afternoon as a 27-over game, but the rain returned to leave the result in the hands of Messrs Duckworth and Lewis, who ruled in favour of the home team.

The third, against Central Districts, began in a gale strong enough to redistribute the markers for the 30-metre circle randomly around the field. The rain returned after 30 overs of the CD innings and that was that. Or was it rain? The Met Service data records rainfall of only 0.4 mm that day, possibly a record for the least amount ever to cause a game to be abandoned. Yet nobody disputed the decision to keep the players off the field, the evidence being there before our eyes. The thing is that to be measured, rain has to fall to earth. The moisture here was driven horizontally by the gale, condemned like the wandering albatross to spend most of its existence in flight. Either that or it was asbestos flakes.

Remarkably, this spell of cricket as played by Noah left Wellington top of the table, each curtailment or abandonment working in their favour. Clearly, Wellington’s mistake all these years has been to take the field when prosperity lay in staying in the changing sheds.

So it was wonderful just to sit in the sun at the Basin today, never mind the cricket. A win for Wellington would keep them at the top of the table with one more to play, while Otago needed a victory to maintain their interest in the competition. The visitors won the toss and elected to bat.

With Hamish Rutherford injured, Croudis and Rippon were an unfamiliar opening pair, both having made their Otago debuts only in the last couple of weeks. Rippon is the epitome of the modern cricketer: a South African who has represented the Netherlands, kolpaked for Sussex, and is now trying his luck on the South Island.

Wanting to know more about him, I looked Croudis up on CricInfo, only to discover that it doesn’t know where or when he was born, or even what his names are. The Otago Daily Times was better informed. Gregor Croudis is 23 and was preparing to start his first teaching job when called up by the province.

The pair made a slow start against the accuracy of Arnel and Bennett, who removed Rippon’s off stump in the eighth over with the score only 25. Bennett is bowling superbly at the moment, quite as well as when he was picked for New Zealand a few seasons ago.

Arnel tired in the last of his five-over spell and was twice driven to the cover boundary by Croudis, who also lifted Taylor over square leg for the first six of the game. At 72 for one in the fifteenth over Otago were well-placed but the entry of Jeetan Patel into the attack changed the game as it so often does on either side of the world.

The off spinner immediately trapped Croudon lbw, punishing the batsman’s temerity in coming down the pitch. In the coming weeks Croudon will often see the same expression of truculent disbelief that he displayed here on the faces of his new students.

Patel had Eathorne caught behind cutting in his next over, but it was Ian McPeake who took out the middle order, winning the game for Wellington in the process. McPeake was twelfth man for the early games in the 50-over competition, until an injury to Anurag Verma gave him a chance.

Today, we experienced peak McPeake. Bowling his ten-over spell straight through, he accounted for numbers four to seven in the Otago order. Three were caught behind by Luke Ronchi, the other at second slip by Michael Papps. There was a touch of green and good bounce in the pitch but only as a reward for spot-on bowling, which is what McPeake produced, at a decent pace too. He finished with four for 33.

Luke Woodcock replaced Patel (two for 11 at that stage) at the southern end, which released the pressure a little, with the left-armer going for two fours in his second over. Hamish Marshall might have kept Patel going with the aim of bowling Otago out, but Woodcock removed de Boorder caught at mid-wicket from a half-hearted shot after the batsman came down the wicket, leaving Otago at 114 for eight.

Christi Viljoen—another lost Vortrekker—hit brightly for a few overs, but Arnel returned to have Smith leg before, and Viljoen was caught at deep mid-wicket to end the innings. Pollard misjudged the catch completely, but held on thanks to a last-second sprawl. Patel, exemplary as ever, finished with three for 23. The target was 154, with a bonus point available if it was achieved within 40 overs.

Even after all this time cricket produces surprises, something I have not seen before. Today it was a left-arm wrist spinner—Rippon—opening the bowling. I haven’t seen many of this genre bowl at all: Sobers possibly, Bernard Julien occasionally, Paul Adams inconsequentially. I saw the South African twice in tests, and checking the records it seems that I witnessed his final test spell, at Hamilton in 2004, all three overs of it, but that’s all. There must have been others, but I can’t think who offhand.

Rippon bowled one over for three runs but was then taken off. Given that it was such a noteworthy event it was a surprise that the official record still (at the time of writing) claims that Josh Finnie bowled that over. Finnie is an off spinner, so not easily confused with a left-arm bowler of any kind. Besides, the bowler had “Rippon” on the back of his shirt which I’d have thought would have been helpful.

Viljoen took the new ball from the northern end. He bowls with a front-on windmill action reminiscent of Max Walker or, for older readers, AL “Froggy” Thomson, whose brief international career included taking the first ODI wicket. Viljoen had Papps caught behind, flailing at a wide one in his second over.

Tom Blundell was the other opener. This time last week Blundell thought that he was first-choice keeper for the national one-day side; now he is second-choice for Wellington, having been supplanted by Latham and Ronchi (returning from injury) respectively. Here, with Hamish Marshall, he moved things along quickly, with five fours off seven balls at one point.

Rippon returned (or, as the scorers would have it, came on) but was a caricature of a wrist spinner, pitching the ball (if at all) anywhere but a length.

The introduction of 18-year-old Nathan Smith (right-arm medium fast) was more successful. He accounted for both Marshall and Blundell in his first over, the first lbw and the second caught at mid on. There was an element of variable bounce and pace about both dismissals.

Ronchi and Taylor chose the direct route to victory, with three sixes between them. They put on 52 for the fourth wicket, 21 short of victory when Pollard was bowled by another ball that kept very low. 200 would have been a challenging target with the pitch deflating by the minute. Ronchi and Woodcock both went before the end, leaving the margin of four wickets look closer than it was.

With only 26 overs needed, the bonus point was achieved, leaving Wellington two points clear at the top of the table with one round-robin game to play. The knock-out phase takes the form of 1 v 2 (winner hosts the final), 3 v 4 (loser out), then the loser of the first game v the winner of the second for the other final place. Wellington have to beat Canterbury in midweek, but thoughts turned to a semi-final at the Basin next weekend.

But the Stop Cricket at the Basin (SCAB) group is cleverer than we thought. There is a concert featuring some of New Zealand’s best-known artistes scheduled for the Basin on semi-final day. Presumably the local authorities regarded the possibility of Wellington gaining a top-three place as being too fanciful to take into consideration. There being no other venue available (and why would there be in a city of 400,000 people, the nation’s capital?), Wellington would take the game far enough away not to need the men in orange suits to deter the Basin faithful.

Wellington v Auckland, T20, Basin Reserve, 22 December 2016

Scorecard

It is twenty-twenty time in the southern hemisphere. On Wednesday, there were 38,000 at the Adelaide Oval to see the Adelaide Aardvarks play the Brisbane Bollweevils. The next day, about 300 of us turned up for the New Zealand equivalent at the Basin between Wellington and Auckland. Believe it or not, this represents an improvement on last season when the T20 competition was done by the time the school holidays started, played mostly in windswept grounds in front of handfuls of spectators dressed as Captain Oates. It culminated appropriately in a final on a near-empty provincial rugby ground that was home to neither team. It was a marketing catastrophe worthy of Gerald Ratner.

So this year the T20 is later with quite a few games at holiday venues, where  there should be decent crowds. There are mitigating factors for the modest attendance at the Basin on Thursday. The game started at 4 pm, the wind was as keen as a boy scout in bob-a-job week, and Wellington’s T20 season thus far had been a disaster, with four losses out of four, while Auckland had a 100% win record from the same number of games.

With Wellington 14 for three in the fourth over it appeared that the form book was being followed like a sacred text. Hamish Marshall—captain in this form of the game—led the way by attempting a single that was as self-deceiving as a Donald Trump tweet. He was run out by a couple of metres by a casual underarm direct hit by his opposite number Rob Nicol at mid off. Few were as quick as Marshall in his younger days, but age wearies us all.

Tom Blundell was next to go, to a good diving catch at mid wicket by Donovan Grobbelaar off Colin de Grandhomme, who took six wickets in the first innings of his maiden test in Christchurch against Pakistan recently. Do not be misled into thinking that he is the new Richard Hadlee; it was a performance that said more about the pitch than the bowler. I have been trying to think of a cricketer comparable to de Grandhomme and have come up with Keith Pont of Essex. This is not intended to be in any way derogatory; Pont was a good county all-rounder in a successful side. Like de Grandhomme his height could make his trundling medium-pacers a little more dangerous than face value suggested and he hit the ball hard as a batsman, but he was never (as far as I recall) spoken of as an international player and with good reason.

Auckland have potentially as quick a fast-bowling bowling combination as I can recall seeing in New Zealand. Tymal Mills, now of Sussex, partners Lockie Ferguson, recently seen bowling at 150 kph in the ODI series in Australia (a speed exceeded only by that at which it then came off the bat, alas).

Wellington’s two overseas players, Jade Dernbach of Surrey and Evan Gulbis of Tasmania were both dropped following a late night out on the evening prior to Wellington’s previous game (and let us forgo remarks about a late night in Nelson being any time after 9 pm). This was to have been Gulbis’s last game before returning to the Big Bash, but Dernbach now has the unexpected joy of New Year in the old country.

Mills’ speed accounted for Grant Elliott. The ball was on to him sooner than he expected, so his cut went straight to third man, one of only two fielders outside the circle at that stage of the game.

But things were not as grim for the home team as it appeared. Opener Michael Papps was joined by Luke Ronchi in a match-winning stand of 115 in 11 overs. Ronchi was omitted from the national one-day team for the series in Australia because of loss of form, but it is hard to recall him striking the ball more sweetly than he did here. He hit Mark Chapman’s slow-left-arm for three (big) sixes off successive balls in the eleventh over in an arc from long off to deep mid-wicket.

Papps batted right through the innings for 62 not out. I don’t think that it Is correct to say that he carried his bat, as that only applies when ten wickets have fallen, but it was a fine achievement whatever it is called. Though there was not the late-innings explosion for which Wellington would have hoped given that wickets were in hand, a total of 173 will win more games than it loses.

T20 captains these days change their bowlers like Imelda Marcos changed her shoes. By the ninth over Nicol had used six bowlers, but Marshall beat that with a different bowler for each of the first six overs of the Auckland innings. Sometimes this is more unsettling for the bowlers than for the batsmen, and can lead to some curious deployments of resources. Here, for example, de Grandhomme bowled two overs for ten runs, but was not used again.

Predictably this was all too much for the Basin Reserve scoreboard, a veteran purveyor of fake news. Today it insisted that Auckland wicket-keeper Glenn Phillips had bowled three overs when it was plain for all to see that he had retained the pads and gauntlets throughout.

Auckland started brightly but never got into the higher gear needed for a chase of this size. That Colin Munro—as pugilistic a practitioner as any in New Zealand—took 44 balls over his 38 sums it up.

Over the past year or so I have noted a retreat to orthodoxy among batsmen in T20. Here, there were only three reverse shots, including two dilscoops off successive deliveries from Patel to Chapman, perfectly executed for two boundaries (Patel was not subjected to the indignity of a long stop that befell some of the England attack at the Chennai test match). Perhaps my spectating is unrepresentative, but it seems that the high-risk trick shots are being left to those who are really good at them, like Sam Billings who demonstrated a complete array at the A ODI I saw at Canterbury in July.

There was a fine standard of catching in the Auckland innings, particularly two from Matt Taylor. Chapman went to a running, diving effort at long off, followed by Munro, caught at deep mid-wicket. Taylor caught the ball, threw it in the air, stepped over the boundary and back again, then completed the catch. I went more than four decades without seeing a catch taken like this, but now it happens several times a year. Taylor came in as one of the replacements for the carousing couple and his fine performance—20 at the end of the innings and three overs for 22 in addition to the catches—may have been a factor in persuading Wellington to hand Dernbach his boarding pass.

The best catch of the day was taken by Luke Woodcock who leapt in defiance of gravity, age and probability to take a catch that appeared to be well out of reach and already past him. Thinking that it had finished the game, Woodcock turned to crowd and raised his arms, soaking up the adulation. It was sometime before he realised that the shouts of his teammates were not to join in the veneration, but rather to persuade him to return the ball to them: Arnel had overstepped and it was a no ball.

Wellington won by 33 runs, but remained bottom of the table while Auckland were still top. The top three go into the two play-off games, so Wellington can afford only one more loss at most from the second half of the round-robin phase of the competition.