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.

Wellington v Auckland, Plunket Shield, Basin Reserve, 11 to 14 December 2014

http://www.espncricinfo.com/new-zealand-domestic-2014-15/engine/match/770765.html

Fourth day

My Life in Cricket Scorecards achieved a lifetime’s ambition at 10 am on Sunday morning; for the first ten minutes of the day it constituted the entire crowd. The first two-and-a-half overs were its private entertainment and it could barely suppress a cry of “Proceed!” before the first ball was bowled.

The early start was down to the weather, which had curtailed progress over the first three days. Play did not begin on the third day until 4 pm when the temperature was measured at six degrees. A penguin wouldn’t accept a free ticket in those conditions. I’m sure that the mercury dropped to similar levels on the Hammond Room roof at the County Ground, Bristol in April days of yore, but I was younger then and my desperation for cricket after the long English winter always set my judgement askew.

So it was not until the fourth day of this Plunket Shield game that I put in my first appearance of the season. Overnight, Wellington were 77 ahead with seven wickets standing, so anything could happen. That’s the delight of first-class cricket: a run chase; a collapse; a canny declaration; elegant attack; sticky defence; the ball turning square; the ball not turning at all; a great catch; a missed stumping; a shambolic run out. Or the whole thing can end in torpid anti-climax. A night at the theatre with a different ending every performance.

One thing was certain: a Cachopa would be involved. There were three of them playing for Auckland: Carl, the all-rounder, Craig, the opening batsman, and Brad, the wicket-keeper. All the size of pixies. In Wellington’s first innings the Cachopii had a hand in nine of the ten wickets.

Today’s script dropped some heavy clues about the denouement almost before the orchestra had finished playing the overture. Left-arm opening bowler Michael Bates removed both the incumbent batsmen in the first quarter of an hour. Stephen Murdoch was caught behind driving at a ball that left him. Tom Blundell was struck on the pads playing across the line. Umpire Ashley Mehrotra took an age to rule. By the time the finger was raised Blundell had already taken several steps towards the rooms.

Another thing that makes cricket the king of pastimes is that even when you have watched for as long as I have it will still conjure something new. Today, when fast bowler Matthew Quinn bowled to debutant Henry Walsh, he did so with seven in the slip cordon, a silly mid off and a mid off. Nobody left to field on the legside then. So when Walsh turned a ball from outside off stump into the vacant acres, as was inevitable, it was the bowler who had to pursue it.

Rob Nicol's 9 - 0 field for Matt Quinn

The best that can be said for this is that it offered Rob Nicol (the Auckland captain) a controlled environment in which to exercise his psychological need to test half-witted theories, rather than exposing society at large to harm.

Walsh lasted for ten overs before losing his leg stump to Bates. It took only a further eight overs for Auckland to finish Wellington off. The most eye-catching feature of the lower-order batting was a series of millionaire off drives from Ili Tugaga, his preferred approach to getting off the mark. When, against expectation, he succeeded in hitting the ball with one of these pieces of speculation, he was caught at mid off for a duck.

That was Carl Cachopa’s third wicket; Bates finished with four for 47.

So what explains Wellington’s subsidence? There was movement, certainly, though the report that described the pitch as “green” was exaggerating, from what I could see at least.

Just as happened when I watched Gloucestershire collapse on the first morning against Kent in September, the ball tended to find the edge of the bat rather than beating it entirely, and most of the edges went to hand. Still, seven wickets had fallen for 50 today, so Auckland’s target of 128 might not be the early Christmas present it seemed.

Opener Jeet Ravel started impressively. He is a tall left-hander with a wide stance and expansive style. A square-driven boundary off Arnel was the shot of the day, but Ravel was out quirkily off the next delivery. As the ball rose off his thigh pad, Ravel attempted to lift his arms clear, but in doing so committed the very indiscretion he was seeking to avoid. He deflected the ball with just enough power to dislodge one bail when it came into contact with the stumps.

Two of the Cachopii—Carl and Craig—were now united. Carl had earlier survived a Gillespie appeal on the grounds that it was too high on the leg, a rare event for one of the brotherhood. The partnership was worth only four when Craig was bowled by a full-length Matt McEwan delivery.

With Auckland 29 for two, Wellington were bouncy. Another couple of wickets and they would be on top.

Colin Munro put an end to such pretensions. Munro is one of those cricketers who takes much the same approach regardless of the format or state of the game. Hard, clean hitting is to Munro what cold baths were to the Victorians: the palliative for all ills.

Here, 59 off 49 balls, 52 of them from boundaries (four sixes), settled the matter. He was particularly harsh on the normally abstemious Arnel.

Munro was out 24 short of victory, but look at the scorecard and you will be misled. It says that he was caught by Walsh. It was indeed Walsh who caught the ball on the long-off boundary, but he was still shuffling his feet to ensure that he did not connect with the boundary rope when he threw the ball to the nearby McEwan, who should therefore be credited with the catch.

McEwan is a bustling medium-fast bowler in the manner and shape of Tim Bresnan. This was his Wellington debut after a couple of seasons with Canterbury. The ball followed him about for a while. He took a fine catch to get rid of Carl Cachopa, running back with his hands above his head, but dropped an even harder chance diving in from the fine-leg boundary in a brave attempt to intercept a Nicol top edge.

It was too late to make a shred of difference anyway. Auckland won the game by six wickets and were top of the table after two rounds. Most of the Plunket Shield will be played while the World Cup is in progress, so I may be a lone spectator again before the season is out.

Wellington v Auckland, T20 Preliminary Final, Basin Reserve, 18 January 2013

http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/match/589241.html

In the city that is the home of The Hobbit the chirpy little local people overcame the evil force from the big bad world outside: Wellington beat Auckland in the preliminary final of the T20.

I have written before of the wisdom of getting to cricket matches in good time:
http://mylifeincricketscorecards.blogspot.co.nz/2010/12/random-thoughts-on-ashes-adelaide.html

The importance of this principle was manifest once more at the Basin on Friday. Indolent spectators lacking in moral backbone who wandered in late after the third over missed the best that this game had to offer: a 17-ball 46 by Jesse Ryder. Twenty came from the first over, bowled by the unfortunate Matt Quinn, with three fours, and a six kept in the ground at long on only by one of the pohutukawas. Giving the new ball to the inexperienced Quinn was to ask a boy bugler to lead the charge, particularly when the cunning and experienced Andre Adams was available.

At the other end, Ben Orton knew that his job was to get off strike as soon as possible, which he did with a single off the first ball, bowled by the experienced left-armer Michael Bates. In the rest of the over Ryder cover drove three boundaries, one off the back foot and two off the front, the second lofted over the infield. Three jewels of shots that would have looked shiny and beautiful in any game of cricket. Ryder did not play a stroke today that was predetermined; each was a response to the ball that was bowled.

Unbelievably, Auckland captain Gareth Hopkins persisted with Quinn from the Vance Stand End. Quinn looks very young and I seriously considered ringing the child protection people at this point. Two fours and a towering six onto the bank were the inevitable result, but from the last ball of the over Ryder was caught on the square-leg boundary; had it carried two metres further it would have been a 17-ball fifty (not the quickest I would have seen: that was Matthew Fleming’s 16-ball effort in a rain-reduced ten-over Sunday League game for Kent v Yorkshire in 1996). It was magnificent batting, with no qualification about it only being T20. Mike Hesson, the Black Caps coach, is shortly to have a conversation with Ryder about the possibility of a return to the national team for the forthcoming England tour of these islands. This is how Hesson should begin this exchange:

Hesson: Please Jesse (can I call you Jesse or would you prefer Mr Ryder?), you just name the terms, you don’t have to practise, just turn up and bat, you can have the house of whichever member of the New Zealand Cricket board you nominate and your own body weight in whatever fast food you choose delivered daily to the dressing room, but please play, I’m begging you.

A quietness overtook the ground for a while, punctuated only by the repentant sobbing of latecomers, as they learned what they had missed. Michael Papps began to build an innings that was perfect for the circumstances, busy, with enough big hits to keep the scoreboard moving at a good rate (by the way Basin Reserve authorities, if you have a scoreboard which shows the scores of team and batsmen by in the form of lit electric bulbs, wouldn’t it be an idea to check that enough of the bulbs are working to enable spectators to see what those scores actually are?). Papps was 70 not out from 48 balls at the end. He put on 79 for the third wicket with Cameron Borgas, who was no quicker about his work than he had been against Otago last week: 29 from 33 balls, not fast enough for the second half of a 20 innings on a good pitch. Borgas has a considerable repertoire of unorthodox shots, but fewer than desirable of the orthodox variety that have stood the test of time over the centuries as a means of moving things along. He was caught at fine third man from a dilscoop, which was just as well for Wellington as it brought in Luke Ronchi, who made 21 from just 11 balls.

Wellington finished with 182 for four, a formidable target, but one that Auckland had the firepower to chase down if they got a good start.

Tugaga removed Lou Vincent lbw from the first ball of the innings, and Gareth Hopkins followed in the second over, caught and bowled by slow left armer Mark Houghton. This left Aaron Finch as the bearer of Auckland’s hopes and dreams. Finch was signed just for the weekend, having been dropped from Australia’s ODI team, in which he featured last weekend (the biggest cheer of the day, incidentally, was raised not for a Ryder six, but for the news that Australia were 40 for nine against Sri Lanka at the Gabba). He was man of the series in this year’s Big Bash (as the Australian T20 is fashioned) and struck fluently from the start. Ryder put him down at backward point, one of five chances that Wellington spurned, something that has to be put right before the final.

Finch drove the Auckland innings along at a fair pace, well supported by Craig Cachopa. They were 84 for two in the tenth, and unease could be seen removing its hat and taking a seat among the home supporters. But at this point Finch was bowled as he made room to cut. From that point on wicket-taker Woodcock and Houghton (a combined three for 52 from eight overs) exercised sufficient control and guile to take the target over Auckland’s horizon. Ryder bowled with intelligence and accuracy towards the end, and Auckland finished 23 runs short, the width of the Sahara in T20 terms.

So it is off to the deep south for Wellington, who face Otago in the final on Sunday.