Sutherland Triumphs in the Southerly

 New Zealand v Australia, 50 overs, Basin Reserve, 21 & 23 December 2024

21 December

23 December

The intention was to laud the world champions. This was New Zealand’s first appearance at home since their surprise victory in the World T20 in Dubai in October, and it was appropriate for it to be at the Basin, home ground of the captain, Sophie Devine and player of the tournament Melie Kerr. And laud the world champions we did, but it was the 50-over title holders Australia  that attracted the praise as they confirmed their vast superiority in the longer form of the game. 

This was no surprise. Before the three-match series began, the RA Vance Pessimists agreed that the best chance of home success rested in the Wellington weather, always a capricious presence. As we saw it, there was next-to-no chance of New Zealand winning two matches against the green-and-gold juggernaut, but if the capital’s resident tempest were to wash away two of the games, there would be a chance that they could abscond with the other, particularly if the southerly could roar in and impose temperatures that the Australians had experienced only in the walk-in beer fridges that feature in some Australasian supermarkets. 

It was a strategy that had promise when the first game was abandoned at an early stage. Indeed, had the rain come ten overs earlier it would have accounted for the second too, but when it arrived it was like a boxing referee intervening to declare that the contest was over through being too one-sided. 

Australia were put in by Sophie Devine. For the greater part of the innings it appeared to be a good decision. Though all the top seven attained double figures, wickets kept falling. At 211 for six after 41 overs it seemed possible that the target might be a tough-but-gettable 250-260. 

But Annabel Sutherland was still there. At that point she had 47 from 52 deliveries, and continued to be measured but untroubled for a further five overs, at which point she had 63 from 64. New Zealand could have thought that they were in the race only then to discover that they were in a Corolla while Sutherland was at the wheel of a Ferrari, the throttle of which she now depressed smoothly, becoming a dot in the distance before the bowlers realised what had happened. In the last four overs of Australia’s innings she scored 42 runs in 17 balls, including six fours and two sixes. 

In the past couple of weeks we have seen fine centuries by Harry Brook and Joe Root at the Basin. Sutherland’s unbeaten 105 was as impressive in many ways, including judgement, planning and execution, and its repertoire of classical shots. She accelerated but never hurried. At 23-years-old she is proof that the quality of the Australian team will perpetuate beyond the Healy/Lanning/Perry generation. 

Australia does not have all the talented 23-year-old cricketers. Auckland’s Molly Penfold dismissed Healy, Perry, Mooney and McGrath on her way to four for 42, as impressive a display of disciplined medium-fast bowling as I can recall from the White Ferns. Penfold and the other bowlers received disappointing support from the fielders, with at least half-a-dozen chances going down, the women emulating the standards of the men in the first test against England.

It was one of those afternoons when the informed spectator held the rain radar in one hand and the DLS charts in the other. The near certainty of an early finish should have worked in New Zealand’s favour, but the ocean of quality between the teams was a journey too far. When the rain reached us, in the 31st over, they were already 65 behind the adjusted target. There were two many dot balls off an attack that was doing its best Scrooge impression in the spirit of the season.

The third match was the first of the series to proceed without the intervention of the weather. It was warm and many of the pohutukawas were flowering, a crimson pelmet to the grass bank along the eastern side of the Basin. A perfect day to be at the cricket. Australia batted first, this time of their own choosing. After 31 overs they were 190 for four, apparently heading for a total somewhere in the 350-plus stratosphere. But the wickets kept falling, with Sophie Devine dismissing Sutherland, and the usually hard-hitting McGrath who did not find the boundary in 33 balls today. Kerr, wicketless two days before, took four, including top scorer Ash Gardner (74). 

Australia were all out in 49 overs for just a run fewer than they made in the second game, but reached by a contrasting route, one that left New Zealand feeling much more positive. Hope, rather than being expunged by a late charge, was revived as the expected target diminished in the last hour of the innings. 

In reply, Suzie Bates top scored with 53, but a more substantial contribution was needed from the top order if New Zealand were to get anywhere close. The RA Vance Pessimists declared it over when Sophie Devine’s misjudgement caused Melie Kerr to be run out. We were impressed by the debut performance of Otago’s Bella James, who got the innings off to a brisk start in both games.

It is fitting that the new honours board at the Basin, recording the results of all international games played there, includes women’s matches, but disappointing that no space has been left for additions to the test match list. South Africa are now playing tests regularly and the cricket community here in New Zealand are downcast that the national body does not want to emulate them. Suzie Bates and Sophie Devine both deserve a test debut in the autumn of their careers. 

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

 

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.