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…
