The Cricketer, May 1973

Dennis Amiss is on the cover of the May 1973 edition of the newly-styled The Cricketer with Cricket Monthly, the title now alone in the cricket magazine market. I noted last month that good performances on MCC’s tour of South Asia had barely registered due to the lack of broadcast coverage. The most acute example is Amiss’s performance in the three-test series in Pakistan.

I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that he made a century in each of the first two tests and 99 in the third, perhaps the best overseas performance by an England batsman in a shorter series until Harry Brooke went one run  better late last year in Pakistan for three hundreds in three games. Amiss is going strong at 80, and was recently interviewed at length on the Final Word. 

Ken Barrington, with his average of 58, is the most underrated English batsman since the Second World War, but Amiss (46, 51 when opening) is not far behind. His achievement in this series did not convert John Thicknesse to his cause in a piece about the options for England’s selectors. Of Amiss and Fletcher (for whom this was also a breakthrough tour) he says “I hope it’s not uncharitable to say that neither has yet done much more than make people reconsider”. About as uncharitable as buying a poppy with a foreign coin, I’d have thought.

Incidentally, anyone not familiar with the Final Word should do themselves a favour and check it out. It is a podcast run by Adam Collins and Geoff Lemon, with occasional help from others such as Dan Norcross and Bharat Sundaresan. They usually put out two lengthy shows a week, one on current events and the other on cricket history, with donors sending them amounts based on cricket statistics that they then have to work out. Collins and Lemon are cricket’s most interesting audio journalists and I look forward to SEN’s commentary on this summer’s tests in England with Collins leading the team.

The three tests in Pakistan were all drawn. John Woodcock reports that “in each of these there was a time on the last day when a result was possible” and, of Pakistan captain Majid Khan, “There were two occasions when, with more aggression, he might have forced an issue”. Nevertheless, all three games faded away into draws, an outcome that accounted for 16 of the 24 tests played between the two countries in Pakistan before last December’s series.

All the more reason to regard the three-nil victory by Stokes’ team on those same dead pitches as one of the greatest achievements in my time watching cricket, Bazball’s finest moment (so far). 

Two pieces of trivia from the 72-73 series: as well as Amiss, Majid Khan and Mushtaq Mohammad also made 99, the only test in which three have fallen one short of the ton; also, both sides were led by current county colleagues. 

The second and third tests between the West Indies and Australia got considerably more column inches than the series in Asia. Pitches were also a focus for Tony Cozier’s report. That for the second test, in Bridgetown, “offered the bowlers minimal help and simply got progressively slower as the [match] progressed”, rather like those in Pakistan. The strip in Trinidad, however, “readily responded to spin throughout and gave uneven bounce”.

We were now just a couple of years away from the emergence of the West Indies pace quartet that, like the Rolling Stones, changed its personnel from time without compromising its place at the head of the pack. So who opened the bowling with Keith Boyce in Port of Spain?

It was none other than Clive Lloyd, whose dobbly medium pacers could be quite effective in the Sunday League, but whose function here was to remove the shine from the ball as quickly as possible, an action that was to be considered heretical around the Caribbean for at least three decades thereafter. 

Lance Gibbs “was the pick of all the bowlers and was never handled comfortably” but it was Australia’s trio of leg spinners, O’Keefe, Jenner and, more surprisingly, Stackpole, who led the way to a 44-run win, along with Doug Walters’ “truly great innings” of 112. 

There are interviews with two Essex players, John  Lever, and Brian “Tonker” Taylor, just appointed to the selection panel. The byline for the latter is that of Martin Tyler, still Sky’s lead football commentator 50 years on. Tyler wrote a couple of cricket books and commentated for ITV regions on Roses matches, but his best-known link with the game is that he was Bob Willis’s flatmate when the fast bowler was called up as a replacement for the 1970/71 Ashes tour.

As both football and cricket have expanded into twelve-month assignments, cross-fertilisation between writers and broadcasters on the two sports has almost disappeared, which is a loss. It used to be usual for journalists to cover a winter and a summer sport. 

ITV’s Brian Moore was a Kent fan. I sat next to him and an older man (his father, possibly) at a knockout match at St Lawrence in the early 90s. His first appearance on TV was on Sunday Cricket in 1965 (Desmond Lynam also made his TV debut on Sunday Cricket, seven years later). The BBC tried to poach Moore in the 70s, and offered him Peter West’s job as presenter of cricket to sweeten the package, but to no avail. 

On the radio, Peter Jones and Maurice Edelston were both occasional commentators on county cricket, and Jon Champion, Mark Pougatch, Mark Saggers and Arlo White all made appearances as callers on Test Match Special. The sports pages at the height of summer often featured football writers at leisure, including Jimmy Armfield in the Daily Express. Best of all was David Lacey’s annual appearance in the cricket pages of The Guardian, usually at Hove. I came across a Lacey line new to me the other day. In a report on a drubbing of Manchester United by Barcelona he wrote:

Pallister and Bruce appeared to be auditioning for the role of Juliet: “Romario, Romario, wherefore art thou Romario?”

The News of the Month has this:

G Boycott has disclosed that the risk of harm to his health following an operation for the removal of his spleen prompted him to declare himself unavailable for the recent MCC tour of India and Pakistan.

Given the tenor of Boycott’s subsequent commentaries, it is to be wondered if they got it all. 

The Cricket Magazines: April 1973

This was the last edition of Playfair Cricket Monthly. Founder and editor Gordon Ross was to become executive editor of The Cricketer incorporating Cricket Monthly. This is presented as a marriage of equals, a blend of the two titles, but my memory is that The Cricketer, which does not mention the merger, remained much as it was, with the coda to its masthead disappearing fairly soon. The spirit of Playfair continued in The Cricketer Quarterly, edited by Ross, a compendium of scores and statistics that filled the gap before the information became available in the following year’s Wisden.

The magazine emerged from the Playfair Cricket Annual, which started in the forties and which Ross continued to edit until his death in 1985. He passed away at Lord’s at the end of a day’s cricket, a departure that any of us might wish for ourselves. The Playfair Cricket Annual continues; this year’s will arrive in our mailbox yesterday, and it is still the most convenient way of looking up a wide range of information. 

A flick through shows why magazine one survived while the other did not. The Cricketer is attractively laid out with photographs on almost every page. Playfair has great slabs of text and lengthy paragraphs. It appears to be short of advertising.

There is plenty of international cricket recorded this month. England’s series in India ended on a flat pitch in Bombay (as it then was), with centuries for Engineer, Vishwanath, Fletcher and Greig, the last two both maidens. India therefore won two-one. A million-and-a-quarter spectators attended the five games. John Woodcock describes it as:

…the series which England should have won; as the one they threw away with some really rather faint-hearted batting in the second and third Test matches.

That was not the end of the tour. A victory by MCC against Sri Lanka is reported this month (test status was still nine years away), and then it was off to Pakistan for three more tests. 

The hosts in that series were recently returned from New Zealand, where they won a three-test series one-nil, as RT Brittenden reports in The Cricketer. What a batting line-up Pakistan had. Zaheer Abbas, Kent’s own Asif Iqbal, Majid Khan, Wasim Raja and Sadiq and Mushtaq Mohammad. The bowling—Sarfraz Nawaz, Saleem Altaf and Intikhab Alam—was not too bad either. In no country has the mismatch of talent and achievement been so large as Pakistan’s. Peter Oborne’s excellent history of Pakistan’s cricket, Wounded Tiger, explains why this is so. More recently, Wasim Akram’s Sultan, ghosted by Gideon Haigh, shows how undermining internal division and rivalry could be. This one was a Christmas present from my wife, a convert to the view that there is no such thing as too many cricket books.

Pakistan’s victory came at the old Carisbrook ground in Dunedin, built on 201 from Mushtaq and 175 from Asif. But here in New Zealand the series is remembered mostly for the world-record breaking tenth-wicket stand of 151 at Eden Park between Brian Hastings and Dick Collinge. The previous record was held by Wilfred Rhodes and RE Foster during the latter’s famous 287 at Sydney in 1903. The Cricketer asked the 96-year-old Rhodes for his memories of a stand that lasted little more than an hour. “I made 40 in that time. I weren’t just defending” said the great man.

Tony Cozier reports in The Cricketer on the first test between West Indies and Australia in Jamaica, a high-scoring draw. I notice that Rod Marsh was out hit wicket for 97, so the air would have been as blue as the sea. 

Of the five tests featured this month, only one was not drawn. The rest were all a day or so off a definitive result. Such matches are now quite unusual. It is a paradox that now, when test cricket’s existence is under threat, the long form of the game itself is much more entertaining than it was fifty years ago. 

Both magazines devote several pages to events in South Africa, particularly the recent tour by the DH Robins XI, ostensibly a private affair but bearing a marked resemblance to an England A team, including Bob Willis, John Hampshire, John Lever, Frank Hayes and several other future test players. 

You wouldn’t think it possible to devote seven pages to cricket in the Cape in this era without using the word Apartheid, but they manage it. The extent of the self-delusion is massive, that cricket can exist in splendid isolation, free of all social and political context, and that the non-white populations should be content with a small amount of money to improve facilities and a few days’ coaching. 

Gordon Ross reported on his recent visit to the Republic. After two pages of crayfish mayonnaise and trips to the races he eventually addresses the issue, but shamefully so:

We paused for some time at the section reserved for the Coloureds [at Newlands]. How absorbed they were in the cricket; how magnificently behaved they were. I couldn’t help but see in the mind’s eye, a D’Oliveira somewhere among them, and fervently hoped that they might enjoy better facilities than ‘Dolly’ did. I am interested only in cricket and cricketers; not politics, race or colour. I only wish somewhere there was a solution to it all.

There was Gordon, yes there was. 

Alan Gibson reviews four books by the same author, who, having been dead for 57 years, was in no position to rebut; it was WG Grace, or rather, his ghostwriters.

Of course, the books were ‘ghosted’, though that practice was not quite so common in his day as it is in ours, nor so widely accepted by the public. Had WG been exposed on television, his most innocent admirers might have wondered where all those fine phrases came from.

Arthur Porritt held the pen for what Gibson considers the best of these books. In his own autobiography, Porritt describes the challenges of this collaboration:

Grace was choke full of cricketing history, experience and reminiscences, but he was a singularly inarticulate man, and had he been left to write his own cricketing biography it would never have seen the light. …Grace accepted me as collaborator with his utmost heartiness, and, although the task of getting the material from him was almost heartbreaking, I enjoyed the work immensely.

The Cricketer has an account by Mike Brearley on his winter travels, first in India, covering the first three tests for The Guardian and The Observer, then in the Caribbean, guesting for Kent, as described in the March editions. He reflects on the challenge of being a current player who turns reporter.

I found cricket-watching enhanced by the journalistic duty; my concentration was sharper and I like having to formulate my response to the day’s play…As a colleague of the players I felt faintly inhibited from any harsh words I might have thought, partly by a sense of solidarity in the face of a public which can be unappreciative, partly by the fear that criticism from me might be taken to imply a belief in my own ability to do better.

The next time England played in India, Brearley was a member of the team, allowing judgment to be made on this matter. 

The Cricket Magazines: March 1973

What a treat to find two articles by Alan Gibson in The Cricketer. The first is a profile of Tony Greig, England’s outstanding player on the tour of South Asia at the time of publication. I maintain that Greig has never been given quite the recognition he deserves for being one of the best of his time, and one of England’s finest all-rounders across the eras.

Gibson hints that Greig was undervalued at this early stage of his international career too. After two years in Sussex Seconds while he qualified as an overseas player, Greig was an immediate sensation, with 156 on Championship debut. It should be remembered that he committed to playing for England before South Africa’s exclusion from international cricket, yet it seemed that English cricket, presented with such a gift, was unwilling to unwrap it, fearful that it might be a bit showy or extravagant.

Greig eventually made his test debut (or so we then thought) in 1970 against the Rest of the World. Gibson reports:

In the second match at Nottingham, which England won (probably the best performance by an England side since the Second World War) he had as much as anyone to do with the victory, taking four wickets in the first innings and three in the second. The batsmen whose wickets he took were Richards (twice), Sobers (twice), Kanhai, Engineer and Barlow. 

Despite topping the bowling averages, and scoring a fifty in the third match, Greig was omitted from the Ashes tour party that winter, and left out throughout the 1971 season, the selectors’ preference being for the more pedestrian Richard Hutton. 

Both players were selected for the Rest of the World squad that toured Australia the following winter.

No doubt both were chosen in the first place because of Australian determination not to pick a Rest of the World side that approximated to the real strength of the Rest of the World: but it did not turn out to be so pointless a series as was intended, and of the two English all-rounders it was Greig who made his mark.

Gibson concludes by reporting the opinion of his colleague at The Times, John Woodcock, to whom he refers by the usual sobriquet.

The Sage of Longparish is not himself a tall man, and has not always been enthusiastic about Greig in the past. What he really feels is that all the best cricketers are five foot three. A judgement from this quarter is therefore convincing.

Gibson’s second piece is titled Cricket in Fiction. It is an amiable ramble that touches upon, among others, Richards, de Selincourt, Dickens, Sayers and, of course, Wodehouse. Also JL Carr, whose recently published A Season in Sinji is mentioned in the opening paragraph, and to which Gibson returns near the end.

I would have enjoyed it if he had left out the cricket.

He forces his analogies, he strains his language, to show that life is just a game of cricket, which is neither more or less true than that life is just a bowl of cherries, some of them going bad, or a sack of potatoes, or – well, whatever analogy happens to come to you. 

Mr Carr is very strong on breasts and lavatories, which I suppose is mandatory in the modern novel. Just as I was beginning to get interested in the bosoms, there was a piece about cricket; and just as I was beginning to get interested in the cricket, back came the bosoms, and the dirt, and the violence. No doubt life is like that : but since we all have to experience it anyway, I doubt if we have any obligation to read about it as well.

Both The Cricketer and Playfair Cricket Monthly reported on the third and fourth tests between India and England. The hosts took a two-one lead in the third, but only by four wickets. England could not cope with the most renowned of spin trios, Bedi, Chandrasekhar and Prasanna. Fletcher’s unbeaten 97 apart, no England batsman made more than 20 in the first innings, and none more than 21 except Denness’s 76 in the second. These were notable innings by both future England captains, but they went almost unnoticed. Pat Pocock took four wickets as India made hard work of their target of 86. As the Sage writes, “With another 50 runs in the bag [England] would probably have won it”.

One thing that I learned was that Derek Underwood could not play in this game, having awoken with a temperature on the first morning. I had thought that Underwood, round-shouldered smoker that he was, had never missed a test match for fitness reasons, but this was illness, not injury. “If any wicket in India was likely to be suited to Underwood’s many talents it was this one in Madras” said Playfair’s anonymous correspondent, who had probably cobbled the report together from press reports, given that the magazine was now an issue away from oblivion. 

In the fourth test, England achieved a lead of 40, but India’s first innings occupied the whole of the first two days on a slow pitch that offered bowlers little, so a draw was the outcome. The highlight was captain Lewis’s 125, his sole test century. The Sage:

Having said that the time had come to attack the Indian spinners, Lewis, in Kanpur, did something about it. When he came in Bedi had bowled nine overs for eleven runs and England were 48 for two…Lewis at once jumped out to hit him over mid-on for four. He had got 70 against Bedi on a turning pitch in England last season by using his feet, and this is what he did now.

Tony Lewis might have been picked for England at any time in the previous decade. The list of batsmen no better than him who were is long. As Woodcock says, the innings showed what Lewis might have achieved “had he had the advantage of playing on better pitches than those in Glamorgan”. 

Another tour is featured in both magazines, that of Kent, as Sunday League champions, to the West Indies. I have written about this tour before but was unaware that both The Cricketer and Playfair carried extensive reports on it, by Michael Carey and Howard Booth (of the Daily Mirror, if memory serves) respectively.

In my original article I called out Wisden’s description of my former skiing instructor Barry Dudleston’s bowling as “chinamen” as wrong, given that the Playfair annual consistently listed him as “SLA”, but it seems that it was indeed wrist spin that he purveyed on this tour.

According to Booth, Colin Cowdrey “rated him a more effective bowler than Ken Barrington on these pitches”. He got Rohan Kanhai out first ball, although it needed a brilliant catch by Alan Ealham off a full toss.

One promising Antiguan batsman was noticed in both reports. This is Carey’s description:

The locals made an entertaining fight of it, largely due to Vivian Richards, a 23-year-old batsman of sound technique and bold method. Cowdrey felt he would play for the West Indies soon.

In Playfair, Cardus laments “the virtual disappearance of the spin bowler”, which was to overstate the case when most counties still went into matches with two slow-bowling options. He tells a story about SF Barnes (and we must remember that in matters of factual accuracy Cardus was the Fox News of his day) and a match that celebrated his eightieth birthday. Barnes was to bowl the first ball and was asked what he intended. “I’ll bowl the first ball but I don’t know about a full over. I can’t spin now, my fingers are too old. I suppose I’ll have to fall back on seamers—any fool can bowl ‘em”.

The Cricket Magazines: February 1973

Both The Cricketer and Playfair Cricket Monthly featured reports on England’s first two test matches in India. Print media were the way in which we learned what had happened in this series. There are short, grainy highlights packages of the second and third tests on YouTube, but I do not recall any of it appearing on television in Britain, even on the news. There was no radio commentary. BBC Radio, without a cricket correspondent following the compulsory retirement of Brian Johnston at 60, did not even send a reporter, relying on Crawford White of the Daily Express to phone in reports to Today on Radio 4 and at the close of play.

The two tests were terrific contests that followed a similar pattern, with low scores on turning pitches—238 was the highest of eight innings—with England chasing targets of around 200 in both. They succeeded in the first test, but failed in the second.

The absence of sound and pictures meant that some fine performances barely registered at the time and have been forgotten about since, most notably Geoff Arnold’s nine wickets in the first test, in which India’s quicker bowlers (if Abid Ali and Erinath Solkar can be so described) delivered only 12 overs. 

At 107 for four chasing 206 and the ball turning like a cornered viper, the match looked to be India’s for the taking, but an unbeaten century partnership by Tony Lewis and Tony Greig took England home. John Woodcock, reporting for The Cricketer, called Greig “the outstanding English cricketer”. Like nobody else until Ben Stokes, the future England captain thrived when the odds were stacked high on the side of quality opposition. 

Lewis was captaining England on test debut, the first to do so since Nigel Howard twenty years before, also on an India tour that the established captain didn’t fancy. None have done so since, for England, at least. Lewis made a duck in the first innings,and came in for the second with the match in the balance, so his unbeaten 70 was quite a performance, unnoticed by most as it was made on Christmas Day, with few papers printing on Boxing Day. England’s victory “was worth all the mistletoe in the world” according to Woodcock, who gives us a sense of how India was consumed by cricket, more specifically test cricket, by describing the aftermath of their win in the second test.

The streets around the hotel where the Indian team was staying had to be closed to traffic; thousands of those inside the ground kissed the turf and performed cartwheels of delight. The result may have been a setback to England, but it was a marvellous thing for cricket in India. Had India lost I would have hated to be Wadekar, so short are people’s memories.

Ajit Wadekar had led India to their first test and series win over England fewer than 18 months before, but his house was attacked when his team lost three-nil in 1974, so Woodcock is not being alarmist. 

Playfair was now on its last legs, three issues away from oblivion, a pity as there is some fine writing in the February edition. Basil Easterbrook’s piece is entitled How a Cricket Writer Can Cope With Wet Days. 

You can of course dash off a feature article, which might fill in half an hour, or compile your expenses account, which will take all morning.

Easterbrook then embarks on an entertaining survey of some of the public houses near cricket grounds in which he has passed wet days. 

Neville Cardus was in the final two years of his life and not terribly well but his piece on Sussex is a late glimpse of a craftsman capable yet of top form atthe tail end of his career, like Cowdrey’s winning century for Kent against the Australians in ‘75. 

In the first paragraph he describes turn-of-the-century Manchester as “a city of begrimed solid dignity” and follows with a word—ratiocinative—that I had to look up, which is always fun. Here it is. 

Both titles carry pieces by former players on the contemporary game, which always have the potential to become a bog of better-in-my-day self-justification. 

In The Cricketer HL “Stork” Hendry, who played 11 tests for Australia in the 1920s, starts with a paragraph that swallow dives into heart of the morass, rescue improbable.

Cricket-lovers are disappointed and disturbed that the great game of cricket, hitherto regarded as a character-builder, is losing some of its attraction to the public.

He dismisses the counter-attractions of other sports as a factor, as they had always been around, but concedes that “the craze of young people to own motor cars has been a contributing factor”.

Hendry’s explanation is “Averages”, his shorthand for batsmen paying too much attention to their own statistics, and not enough to the needs of the team or the crowds. 

Decades ago the goal of the batsman was a century; having attained this they usually proceeded to get out.

The introduction to the piece records that Hendry scored 325 not out against the New Zealanders in 1925-26.

In The Cricketer Charles Barnett, whose Gloucestershire career also began in the twenties, is altogether more understanding of the challenges faced by the modern cricketer, with whom he sympathises for having to adapt between different forms of the game and back again over a single weekend. It does seem astonishing that counties would begin a Championship game on a Saturday, play a separate 40-over match on a Sunday (sometimes in a different county), then resume the three-day game on Monday morning. 

Barnett puts forward a common proposal of the time, that young batsmen of promise should be omitted from one-day teams in their formative years. He even takes the trouble to suggest that counties make arrangements with golf clubs so that these youthful flowers might be fully occupied on their days off, presumably lest their unoccupied minds strayed to unclean thoughts of reverse sweeps.

Barnett is dismissive of the orthodox view that the influx of overseas players to county cricket is a bad thing, 

Their very example is now there for every young player to see and if wise try to copy.

He also has the good idea that run outs from direct hits should be recorded as ‘thrown out”, with the fielder credited.  

Williamson and Nicholls Shine at the Basin

 New Zealand v Sri Lanka, Second Test, Basin Reserve, 17-20 March 2023

Scorecard

This was the 2,500th test match since it all began in Melbourne 146 years ago, and in New Zealand, at least, the format has never been so vibrant or appealing.

The most remarkable match that any of us have seen was followed just two weeks later in Christchurch by only the second occasion on which test-match victory was obtained off the last possible ball, as Kane Williamson hurled himself ahead of the throw to record the most valuable bye in cricket history.

When Ian Smith tailored his bespoke “by the barest of margins” description of the end of the Game of Which We Do Not Care to Speak in 2019, he could not have imagined that it would become an off-the-peg expression for use at home in the following few years.

Domestic cricket has been infected by the tension trend; Wellington’s games with Northern Districts this season have been won by one wicket and lost by two runs. Has any other ground staged games with one-wicket and one-run margins in the same season?

This test match was not a classic, but it contained much good cricket, almost all of it played by the home team. It was, even more than most cricket matches, full of statistical oddities. One of these was that it was first time since 1996 that New Zealand had selected a team with no left-armer as part of the attack. Dan Vettori, Trent Boult and Neil Wagner are the three main reasons for the sustained period of ambidextrousness and it was the latter's absence that ended it. Just as he was at the Basin against England, Wagner was crucially involved at the end of the Christchurch game, where he ignored injuries that would have put most of us in a wheelchair to complete the winning bye. He says that his test career is not over, and we all hope that he is right.

Doug Bracewell, cousin of Michael, son of Brendon, nephew of John, replaced Wagner, his first test appearance since 2016. There are a number of reasons for the long sabbatical, one being the unprecedented strength of New Zealand’s pace bowling in this period, another a run of injuries, some sustained in the early hours. A deceased cockatoo was also complicit.

Bracewell D also became the sixth player in the team with a double L in his name, but this may be mining the seam of statistical obscurity a little too deep.

The Basin Reserve pitch has sometimes been described in these columns as an early celebration of St Patrick’s Day, so, with the test match starting on that day, it was no surprise that something with the hue of an algae-covered pond was revealed when the covers were removed. We should all have learned by now that green pitches in New Zealand are fierce-looking dogs that roll over to have their tummies rubbed at the first opportunity. Sri Lanka learned this the hard way. An attack that had looked capable in Christchurch appeared to take the view that winning the toss had handed them a fistful of chips that could be cashed in simply by turning their arms over; in fact, great precision was required to extract any help that the pitch held within it.

Rajitha and Fernando were erratic in length; Kumara was more consistent, but only inasmuch as he was always far too short. There was also the wind, which Devon Conway described as the strongest he had experienced in his six years at the Basin. The quicker bowlers from the southern end will have felt as if they were marking time as they ran in, while for the spinners controlling flight was akin to taming an eagle. Later in the match Michael Bracewell tossed one up only for the gale to take it from its line on the stumps past the return crease for a wide.

Neither of New Zealand’s openers could blame the pitch for their fall. Tom Latham, on 21, pulled a catch straight to the only deep fielder.

Conway was in top form, his driving through the offside a thing of beauty, accounting for a good proportion of the 13 fours that contributed to his 78. Just when he looked booked in for a big score, Conway came down the pitch to off spinner Dhananjaya de Silva, but didn’t quite get there. The bowler took an athletic return catch.

Kane Williamson and Henry Nicholls were now together. At the start of the test season there was criticism of Williamson with foolish phrases such as “if he can be bothered to turn up” bandied about. Now free of the elbow injury that weighed him down for a while, he has produced scores of 132, 121 and, here, 215 in successive test matches, each of which were the foundation of a New Zealand victory. His average in winning test matches is higher than any except Bradman’s (which is almost 50 higher, of course). Already New Zealand’s leading test runscorer, Williamson passed 8,000 runs at the Basin.

Conversation turned to whether he, or Martin Crowe, is our greatest batsman (acknowledging that Bert Sutcliffe and Martin Donnelly both have their advocates). Crowe, for all his technical correctness, was part nature and part art, while Williamson is more science and engineering. Let us not forget that engineers also produce things of beauty, as Williamson did here, playing with the ease and smoothness of Sinatra crooning a classic. 

Henry Nicholls is not the Last Chance Saloon’s best customer. That must be Zak Crawley. But he has been there so often that they know his tipple  and have it waiting for him as he walks through the door. With Young and Phillips both challenging his place, Nicholls joined Williamson aware that he had to produce something notable to ensure that this was not his last test match.

He was dropped by debutant keeper Madushka on six, a chance similar to the critical miss of Williamson in Christchurch that brought about Dickwella’s exclusion here. Nicholls was also dropped on 92, a return catch to Jayasuriya, but had already restored his reputation by then. Dropped chances are outside a batter’s control, but they are a test of resilience under the sort of pressure that Nicholls found himself, and he passed emphatically. He was harsh on the short bowling that Sri Lanka persisted with, and accelerated as New Zealand pushed towards a declaration. He reached 200 from 240 balls, the first time that two New Zealanders had made double hundreds in the same innings. 

The third-wicket partnership was worth 363, two fewer than Williamson’s world-record sixth wicket stand with BJ Watling against the same opponents at the Basin in 2015, and 11 more than the one they beat: Watling and McCullum’s against India here the previous year. The New Zealand record for the third wicket remains 467 by Martin Crowe and Andrew Jones, again against Sri Lanka at the Basin, in 1991. 

That was the world record until surpassed by Sangakkara and Jayawardene’ 624 against South Africa in 2006. How Sri Lanka could have done with those two great players now. Even so, with Karunaratne, Mathews and Chandimal all with test averages around or above 40, we expected getting them out for under the follow on of 381 would be tricky.

Two wickets were lost in the 17 overs left on the second day after the declaration. Matt Henry showed how the new ball was best used on this pitch with a probing line and length to induce an edge from Fernando, then Conway took a spectacular catch at point to dismiss Mendis, Doug Bracewell’s first test wicket for six years.

The first session of the third day saw two quick wickets rewarding proficient opening spells from Southee and Henry, though Mathews could have left the one that he edged to Blundell. For the rest of the morning Karunaratne and de Silva demonstrated that serenity could arise from the application of a little technique and patience, and there seemed no reason why Sri Lanka should not work steadily towards at least batting for long enough to make the enforcement of the follow on out of the question.

But the common sense that had characterised the morning was swept away with the lunchtime leftovers, starting with Chandimal giving Michael Bracewell the charge, and Blundell an easy stumping, In Bracewell’s next over, de Silva also ventured down the pitch only to chip an easy catch to Southee close in at mid wicket. The inevitable foolish run out was added to the mix, a desperate Karunaratne holed out at long on as he ran out of partners and soon enough Sri Lanka had lost their last six wickets for 65 since lunch. 

Michael Bracewell became, somewhat improbably for one who was only an occasional bowler three years ago, the first New Zealand spinner to take three wickets in the first innings of a home test since Bruce Martin took four in successive games against England in 2013.

With a six-man attack, the first innings done in 67 overs and rain predicted for the fifth day, Tim Southee enforced the follow on. Had Sri Lanka’s second innings been their first, they might well have come out with a draw. The control and discipline, which had been largely absent apart from the Karunaratne/Chandimal partnership,now spread across the order.

It was too late for there to be tension, however, particularly after the forecast improved and a fifth day was guaranteed. For the spectators the rest of the game was like watching one of the Lord of the Rings movies that are put together just over the hill from the Basin. We knew how it would end, but it took an interminable time to do so. 

Again, two wickets fell before the close. Fernando flicked a loose catch to square leg. Karunaratne reached his second half century of the day before becoming the first of five successive Sri Lankans to fall for the fatal allure of the short-pitched delivery, Conway taking a very good catch on the square legside boundary as it came to him out of the sun. 

Mendis and Mathews both went tamely in the first quarter of an hour of day four, and we started making plans for an afternoon at leisure. However, Chandimal (again) and de Silva batted with excellent judgement and considerable flair before the former top edged to fine leg just before lunch. 

Madushka was resolute in a sixth-wicket partnership of 76, and appeared to have shepherded his partner to a deserved century, but de Silva, two short of a tenth test hundred, toe-ended a lap-sweep to give short leg an easy catch. He was bereft, but got a standing ovation anyway. Crowds are generous when they know that a win is in the bag. 

The last three wickets resisted for an admirable yet irritating 35 overs, showing grit and technique. The short ball had worked well for New Zealand, but a few more at the stumps in this period might have hastened the end as the Sri Lankan tail was better at the leave than their brethren higher up the order. 

If Tim Southee is to remain New Zealand’s captain, the ICC will have to consider including Google Earth into the DRS system to ensure that the ball is in the same picture as the bat. He blew his reviews on some notable non-events, the worst of which was for a caught behind that the unsighted leg slip appealed for, supported by neither the bowler nor the keeper. He is one for 23 in terms of successful appeals. 

There was also the wind, which freshened to the extent of the camera operators having to abandon their positions on the scaffolding at the southern end of the ground, returning us to 1970s one-end coverage. I half-expected Jim Laker’s voice on the highlights, telling us what a thrillin’ innin’s we were watching. 

Two slip catches completed the game as we went into the extra eight overs. New Zealand have now gone six years without losing a home series, and recent performances against Pakistan, England and Sri Lanka have restored our faith to some extent.

That concludes my cricket season 2022-23. A great test match and a good one will be treasured in the memory. I hope that the fixture list offers more opportunities to watch for domestic first-class and 50-over matches next season, when we have Australia and South Africa visiting for test matches.