Wounded Tiger by Peter Oborne

Peter Oborne is a political journalist with a pleasing sideline in cricket books; meaty, important cricket books that fill gaps in cricket scholarship. His biography of Basil D’Oliveira was masterful. He has followed it with Wounded Tiger, a history of cricket in Pakistan.

Has a cricket book ever been based on so much hard journalism? In an era when Pakistan is regarded as a no-go zone for westerners, his pursuit of the facts took him not only to the main centres of Lahore and Karachi, but also to places such as Peshawar, an hour away from the border with Afghanistan, where western visitors are usually war reporters not cricket historians. He records his inability to go to Baluchistan and Kashmir (the most militarised place in the world, we learn) as if it amounted to professional negligence. All in the cause of cricket scholarship.

The collection of primary evidence through interviews was essential because source documentary material on the early days of Pakistan cricket does not exist. I have been reading reviews of the latest work by the pre-eminent Tudor historian John Guy, (my tutor at Bristol University a long time ago). Addressing himself to the last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign, Guy has done what he always does: he has gone back to the primary sources and rebuilt the story. He had more to work on from England four centuries ago than Oborne has on Pakistan cricket a few decades past. Of course, many of the oral accounts are incomplete and contradictory, but Oborne guides us through them skilfully.

His biography of D’Oliveira and its account of cricket under Apartheid dealt with the old canard that cricket and politics should not mix. Like non-white South Africans, Pakistani players might have wished that they had the luxury of choice. Pakistan’s cricket emerged from politics in its rawest form: the turmoil of the partition of India in 1947. Some of the most famous names of the early decades of Pakistan cricket were among the the millions of Muslims forced to flee to the new country, including the five Mohammad brothers, four of whom were to play test cricket. I saw Mushtaq and Sadiq play often enough in county cricket, but had not appreciated how perilous their early lives had been.

Politics sets the game’s parameters today more than ever. The UAE appears to be an indefinite home from home, while relations with India mean that Pakistani cricketers—only Pakistani cricketers—are forbidden to milk the golden goat that is the IPL.

As millions struggled their way north and west in 1947, one Muslim was making the journey in the opposite direction. Fazal Mahmood travelled from Punjab in the north of the emerging country to Poona, “an insanely dangerous journey for a twenty-year-old Muslim male”. He had been selected in the Indian team for the tour of Australia and he was determined to make the training camp, oblivious to the chaos and danger, but eventually had to give in to political inevitability.

Fazal Mahmood is the first of heroes of Pakistan cricket whose stories Oborne tells; Wounded Tiger begins ingeniously with Fazal in the crowd at the Oval, watching as England wins the Ashes in 1953. A year later he was back, bowling Pakistan to series-squaring victory with twelve wickets.

That the young country was playing test cricket at all was remarkable, given that its domestic cricket was sparse and somewhat chaotic. How come it was granted almost immediate test status? Oborne puts it down to a victory against an MCC touring team (missing a few big names) in 1951. India proposed Pakistan and England seconded. Perhaps the inclusion of a seventh test team to fill an empty summer in 1954 appealed to Lord’s.

The safe passage of the Mohammad brothers was as well for Pakistan’s first decades of test cricket. Hanif Mohammad usually batted as if surviving a nuclear winter, the essence of a young nation making its way against the odds. Oborne presents Mushtaq Mohammad as one of Pakistan’s most under-rated and best captains, genially presiding over one of its most successful periods in the 1970s.

By then, most of the Pakistan team were familiar to us on the county circuit. Sarfraz Nawaz bustling in with short, angry steps at Northampton; Imran Khan, filmstar pace at Worcester and Hove; Zaheer Abbas, a double and single hundred in one game at Canterbury in the golden summer of ‘76. Above all, Asif Iqbal, dancing down the pitch to lash it through the covers. (How uncomfortable that the source of Pakistani matchfixing can be traced to Sharjah while Asif was in charge there). That county experience, and Kerry Packer, turned Pakistan’s players into professionals, no longer happy to be amateurs with jobs tied to the game.

Javed Miandad comes out of this account well. He has often been presented in the western press as some sort of upstart street urchin. In fact, his origins were firmly middle-class. Oborne credits him with accepting the captaincy at difficult times then gracefully stepping down for Imran Khan whenever the great man made himself available.

Oborne (who, it might be noted, has usually written for right-wing newspapers) is consistently critical of the attitudes of the English players, administrators and media towards Pakistan. He is scathing about the Idrais Baig incident on the MCC (in modern terms an England A team) tour in 1955, using MCC archives to tell a more complete version of the story than has been available before.

Baig was an umpire whose performance had displeased the MCC players. In Peshawar, Baig was taken from his hotel, bound and gagged, moved across town and then drenched with water. It was serious assault, but was laughed off by the MCC team and management as only a joke, the go-to excuse for bullies through the ages.

Oborne’s assessment of the “finger-wagging” incident at Faisalabad in 1987 is that it was incompetently handled by those in charge on both sides. But he makes a telling comment about Mike Gatting: “It is hard to come to grips with the set of values which led the England captain to take such a strong stand against allegedly poor Pakistani umpiring, yet be relaxed enough about apartheid to take a rebel squad to South Africa”.

The middle part of the book tends towards a series-by-series recitation. There is much good cricket played by many good cricketers—Abdul Qadir’s story is told with particular relish—as well as a good deal of selectorial mercuriality, players falling out, administrators with varying degrees of competence and cricketing knowledge, and a revolving door approach to the captaincy. The clues to how this came about are littered through the book and often come down to politics, cricketing, national and international.

The story of last quarter-century is related in themes and is the best part of the book. There is the glorious story of reverse swing, a new dimension to the game achieved only with immense skill; needless to say, the British press assumed it was those Pakistanis cheating again.  

The chapter on betting and match-fixing is the book’s saddest. It is clear that Pakistan cricket has been cursed (Oborne’s description) by the bookmakers for several decades. He makes an interesting comparison with prohibition in the United States in the 1920s, concluding that a legalised and regulated cricket betting market would be the best way of exercising control. He visited Mohammad Amir while the young bowler was serving his ban for the Lord’s no-balls. Oborne finds him playing tapeball cricket with the other village lads. He rightly presents the brilliant young bowler as a victim who stood little chance of being able to resist the massive pressure he came under from bookmakers and senior players. I am pleased to have seen Mohammad Amir play at the Basin Reserve earlier this year and hope that the cricket fraternity welcomes him when Pakistan’s tour of the UK begins in a couple of weeks.

I had not understood before reading the book how cricket was an urban, middle-class sport in Pakistan, and that its spread to the lower classes and the rural north and west is recent. Pakistan has achieved a broadening of interest in the game that the ECB and ICC aspire to but can’t deliver. One consequence has been the emergence of Afghanistan as a cricketing country: poppies on a battlefield.

Of course, 9/11 changed everything for Pakistan cricket. Home test matches were spasmodic thereafter, and ended indefinitely with the attack on the Sri Lankan team bus in 2009. Out of that and the spot fixing scandal emerges the final hero of the story: Misbah-ul-Haq.

Misbah took over the Test captaincy with his predecessor facing imprisonment, unusually difficult circumstances even when judged by the regicidal standards of that office. What’s more, he was a 36-year-old batsman who had never quite established himself in the test side. Oborne sums up:

The task that he faced was more difficult than any previous Test captain, including Kardar. He had to lead a cricket team in exile, deal with constant charges of corruption and match-fixing, and confront a chaotic administration.

Almost six years later, Misbah is still there having won more tests than any other captain of Pakistan with a victory percentage only fractionally below Wasim Akram’s lead mark, all without playing a single test at home.

Needless to say, some of the most famous names in Pakistan cricket are calling for him to be replaced for the tour of England. At this time, more than any, they were lucky to stumble upon him.

My most serious criticism of this fine book is the statement on page 261 that Wasim Bari was in 1976 “the world’s top wicketkeeper”. Readers would, I think, be disappointed if I did not assert the rights of the Kentish candidate to that title.

Wounded Tiger was Wisden’s Book of the Year in 2015 and deservedly so. We must hope that Peter Oborne will soon shine his torch of journalism and scholarship into another of cricket’s dusty corners.

Watching Godfrey Evans

Following last week’s piece on one great Kent and England wicketkeeper, here is something about another.

I have seen Godfrey Evans play cricket. Proper cricket that is, a County Championship game. Given that Evans retired in 1959, I flatter myself that this would surprise acquaintances.  

It was Canterbury Week 1967. Alan Knott was to make his test debut at Trent Bridge, so Evans was called up to replace him in the second match of the week, against Yorkshire, the leaders. Kent were second in the table and as it turned out, this was the deciding game. Yorkshire’s seven-wicket win gave them 12 points; the margin between the two teams at season’s end was ten. Here’s the scorecard.

Perhaps it was the importance of the match that prompted Kent to recall Evans (47) to the colours, but it still seems a bit odd, given the presence of David Nicholls in the Kent team. Nicholls took the gloves for the following game, against Essex, and deputised for Knott most capably for the next ten years. Then again, Evans was the world’s most experienced international player with 91 tests (Colin Cowdrey would draw level with him at Trent Bridge the following day). He was demonstrating age-defying agility and co-ordination on television for the International Cavaliers most Sundays. For the biggest match that Kent had played since the First World War, why not choose experience?

I was there on the first day, a beautiful, blue-sky Wednesday, as all days of childhood summers are in the memory, in defiance of the historical record (it was the summer of love, probably because people needed something to do out of the rain). We sat on the benches on the Bat and Ball side of the ground. I haven’t watched from there since, not for more than a few minutes anyway.

The crowd was large, more than would be allowed in these days, though several thousand short of the number at the Gillette Cup semi-final a three weeks before, when the boundary shortened as the day wore on to accommodate the growing throng.

Brian Close was away, captaining England. He achieved five wins in six tests that summer, but had the captaincy taken away from him for the winter tour as a result of time-wasting at Edgbaston, or at least his cussed reaction to accusations thereof. The committee room at Lord’s hid well its disappointment at having to reinstate Colin Cowdrey (Tonbridge and Brasenose). Fred Trueman captained Yorkshire in Close’s absence. Seven of his team had played test cricket; three more were to do so and the eleventh, opening bowler Tony Nicholson, should have done. Trueman no doubt took the opportunity to drop into the Kent dressing room before the game to appraise them of this information. Perhaps Evans was there to redress the balance off the field as well as on it.

Guile and precision had long since taken the place of brutish pace in Trueman’s bowling, but he was still quick enough to break Brian Luckhurst’s hand in his opening spell. Stuart Leary dug in with a somewhat uncharacteristic three-and-half-hour 66 (a few weeks later he became the only batsman I ever saw clear the old lime tree), but the memory of the day that lingers is of Alan Brown tonking Trueman for 18 off four balls late in the innings.

Brown was a fast bowler with a dragging action, one of the last to carry this legacy of the backfoot lbw law. He played in two tests on Ted Dexter’s tour of Pakistan in 1961/2, when the prospect of playing cricket in south Asia did not have the attraction for the leading players that it does today. But it was Brown’s tailend slogging that caught the imagination of the boy on the boundary that day. The Kent faithful thought that in giving Trueman a sense of his own fallibility Brown was doing him a service, but two for 39 from ten overs shows how well the great bowler had bowled earlier in the innings.

Trueman greeted Evans’ entry at No 8 by doffing his cap and dusting the batting crease with it. Evans made ten before taking his position behind the timbers (as Brian Johnston used to say) for the final hour or so of the day. I have no specific memory of his keeping, but have no reason to doubt Wisden’s report that he “kept wicket superbly”.

Yorkshire won the game quite easily by seven wickets and took the second of a hat-trick of Championships. There is debate about whether the current Yorkshire team, attempting to emulate this feat this season, is better than that of the sixties. If they are, nobody will touch them.

The 1967 season ended happily for Kent nevertheless. Three weeks later the Gillette Cup was won at Lord’s and the glory years began.

Thirteen years later Evans gave an altogether more memorable display of his skill and extraordinary longevity. It was Old England v Old Australia at the Oval in 1980, played on the day before the centenary test began at Lord’s, a match now remembered for Dickie Bird’s fussiness over a damp patch in the outfield that denied a full house most of Saturday’s play.

The previous Wednesday was fine. It was nostalgic at the time. Reading the scorecard makes it seem all the more so in retrospect. It reminds me that I saw Neil Harvey play. One of the 1948 Invincibles. That’s quite something. He stood at mid on in sunglasses (long before this was customary) then finished the game with a composed 22 not out. It was the only time I saw Ken Barrington. He lifted a six onto the tin roof of the old stand beside the pavilion, an enormous hit. Little more than six months later he was dead, on duty as assistant manager with England in the Caribbean. A last chance to see most of the rest. All echoes of the players they once were of course, but an echo can carry sufficient cadence to identify the original tune.

Which brings us back to Godfrey Evans, by now 60. The card shows that he stumped both Australian openers off Fred Titmus. One was straightforward, but the manner of the other (Bobby Simpson I think), suggested that Evans had forsaken the hard stuff a while before and had instead been drinking exclusively from the fountain of youth. The ball slid down the legside, the batsman lifted his foot for a second, and with a blur of the gloves, the bails were off.

The PA announcer declared that the batsman had been bowled. There was confusion among the cognoscenti; we didn’t know whether to trust the evidence of our binoculars. But there it is on the scorecard. Stumped. The muttonchop whiskers might have belonged to a crewman of the Jolly Roger, but the feet and hands were those of Peter Pan.

Our story now moves forward to January 1999 and the Ashes test at Sydney. On the second day my seat in the Churchill Stand* was next to two elderly sisters and the husband of one of them. It was unclear to me to which he was married, and he seemed hazy on the matter too. They were up from the country for a day at the test, as had been their habit since the war (almost certainly the second one). Their dress and demeanor suggested that they had come all the way from 1948. I asked them about the players they had seen. The name that produced the broadest smile and a faraway look in the women’s eyes was that of Godfrey Evans. “Such a showman...the best wicketkeeper we have seen.”

During the lunch interval Evans, passing the winter hosting supporters’ tours, appeared in the stand. When I drew his presence to their attention, they sighed and become young again for a moment.

Godfrey Evans died just five months later, his ability to enchant unabated to the end.

*Named after the rugby league legend Clive Churchill. It would be frustrating being named Churchill and having something named after you. Nobody would realise it was about you.

Alan Knott at 70

During the recent World T20, Australia played New Zealand. Glenn Maxwell got one to turn sharply past Colin Munro’s outside edge. Wicketkeeper Peter Nevill’s hands started to move only after the ball had passed. I thought what I always think, what I have always thought, on such occasions for the last fifty years: Knotty would have had it.

So he would have too, for Alan Knott was the finest wicketkeeper that I have seen, will ever see.

A while ago, some younger work colleagues who are keen on cricket raised the subject of Geoff Boycott’s selection of a team of the best players he had seen or played against. Boycott’s pick of Alan Knott as keeper rather than Adam Gilchrist, attracted ridicule, identifying the Yorkshireman as an old fogey.

Gather round, my young friends, as I reveal your foolishness to you.

“How would Knott have got on keeping to Shane Warne?” they might ask. “Brilliantly” is the unhesitating answer (a less benevolent blog than My Life in Cricket Scorecards would be tempted to respond with another question: “How would Gilchrist have got on keeping to Derek Underwood on a drying turner?”, but the purpose here is to celebrate one great cricketer, not to denigrate another).

By the way, one of the few things that Boycott agreed with Tony Greig about was that Knott was the greatest keeper he had ever seen. Greig used Knott as the benchmark whenever the Channel Nine commentators were comparing glovemen. Ray Illingworth thought so too. He may have incomprehensibly preferred Norman Gifford to Derek Underwood on several occasions, but he was unshakeable in picking Knott as his keeper. This is the only recorded case of two Yorkshiremen admiring someone from Kent.

Knott’s brilliance behind the stumps is evident from a quick search on YouTube. But it wasn’t the flashy dives and extraordinary catches that impressed the old pros;  it was Knott’s consistency. Wicketkeepers should be judged not by the chances they take, but by those that they miss. A keeper who has one chance all day and takes it has had a better day than one who has six chances and takes five of them. Alan Knott made takes and catches that others would not be thought badly of for not attempting; but what made him better than all the rest was that he missed less than anybody. For Kent, as well as England; not once did he give anything less than his best for the county (the same could be said for Underwood). In this respect he differed from his predecessor in the Pantheon of great Kent keepers, Godfrey Evans, who rarely had an off day in a test match, but would perform indifferently for the county when his heavy social schedule drained him of energy and concentration.

Some will promote the claims of that fine wicketkeeper Bob Taylor as the best of the era. At the time, it was commonly said that Taylor was the better keeper, but that Knott’s superior batting kept him in the England team. The fact that Taylor stood up to medium pacers more than Knott did was incorrectly seen as evidence of the Derbyshire man’s superior skill. In fact, Knott believed that more chances would be offered if he stood back than if he stood up; don’t forget that Underwood was always classified as medium paced, and Knott’s work standing up to his co-assassin was as close to perfection as it is possible to come on a cricket field.

Barry Dudleston believed Knott to be the better keeper of the two. Barry played against both men many times and, as recorded here previously, was himself a county wicketkeeper, briefly but gloriously. He said that Taylor, when standing up, would sometimes move his foot back an inch or so as he took the ball, to rebalance. Knott never had to do this; his balance was always perfect.

Alan Knott averaged 32 with the bat in tests, just one fewer than IT Botham (another noted all-rounder) and respectable for any No 7, whatever else they had to offer. But with Alan Knott, the quantity of runs is not how he should be judged. It was when he made them and how he made them.

Knott was a T20 batsman before his time, his guard merely a point of departure for his journey around the crease as the pinball wizard, sending the ball in all manner of unexpected directions. I had a chat with Dennis Lillee about this once. For reasons that were never clear, the great bowler was flogging photocopiers in Bristol one day in the late eighties and the school I worked at sent me along. I took with me a scorecard of the Oval test of 1981 for him to sign. Lillee took seven for 89, his test best, and I was there to see him do it.  

When I handed him the card, it was not his own figures that took his eye, but Knott’s name. He had forgotten that Knott had played in that famous series (he came in for the final two tests). “He was an awkward bastard to bowl at. He’d hit you where you thought you couldn’t be hit.” One great player regarding another as worthy of the contest.

Look again at that Oval card. In the first innings Knott came in after four wickets had fallen for ten runs. His 36, including a couple of fours off Lillee lifted over gully from outside leg stump to prove the bowler’s point, was the only double-figure score made by anybody below No 4 in the order.

In the second innings he came in at six down for 144, the target of 383 well beyond reach, but half a day left to battle through. Close of play: Knott 70 not out, test match saved. It was his last test innings. Knott did not care to make easy runs. Against a tired attack, expect him to be out quickly for not many. Put his back against the wall against top bowling and the quiet fighter would approach the crease. If there were a measure of the value of runs to the team at the time, Knott would rank above any of the great keeper-batsmen. This was so from his first overseas test tour to the Caribbean in 1968, when his unbeaten 73 in the final test in Georgetown saved the match and won the series, to that last day at the Oval 13 years later. Here is an extract from the Wisden report from the Bourda:

All  seemed lost when Knott joined Cowdrey, but he was there to stay until the end, almost four hours later...Somehow, Knott extracted enough help from the tailenders to steer his side to safety...he was well nigh as assured as Cowdrey and no less courageous.

Delve into the circumstances of any of Alan Knott’s five test centuries or 30 half-centuries (and some of the 30s and 40s too) and you will often find that they were made in times of trouble.

One more example. Trent Bridge 1977, third Ashes test. Knott came to the crease with England at 82 for five on the first day. This rescue job was more complicated than usual, as it involved penetrating the tormented psyche of Geoffrey Boycott. The Napoleon of the Ridings had returned from three-year exile on his personal Elba, only, it appeared, to have met his Waterloo. He was recoiling from having run out local favourite Derek Randall (the only time he expressed any visible regret for dispatching a partner). Refocusing Boycott was essential if England were to pass Australia’s 243. The outcome: a partnership of 215, with 107 for Boycott and 135 (at four an over) from Knott. It was the decisive stand in the series, ensuring a two-nil lead with two to play.

A quality apparently valued in modern keepers is the ability to emit a constant stream of vacuous noise all day. Knott was Trappist by comparison, but volume is not to be mistaken for personality. His career was a slow capitulation to eccentricity. The headware tells the story. At first a regulation cap, Kent’s or England’s as appropriate. Quite early though, the MCC touring cap became the hat of choice, on tour or otherwise, followed by the sun hat, worn at first in sunny places like Australia, but later in locations such as Derby and Old Trafford where it was an excessive precaution. As the years went on, the handkerchief drooped permanently from the left pocket, the pads became ever more baggy and were secured by tape. Touching the bails began as a start-of-innings affectation, then developed into a sort of continuing nervous tick.

And, of course, the calisthenics continued. In an era when the closest to regular exercise most cricketers took was the raising of the right arm in the bar after play, with Knott it appeared that the batting and wicketkeeping were interrupting the main activity, which was stretching. His between-deliveries routine was more entertaining than watching some players bat and bowl.

When Derek Underwood turned 70 last year I wrote that he would be my favourite cricketer until Alan Knott reached that age. That day came last week. Happy birthday Knotty. The truth is that I find it impossible to choose between them. To discover cricket just as these two great players of Kent were starting out, and to have watched them over so many seasons was the most extraordinary good fortune.

Auckland wins the Plunket Shield

Wellington v Auckland, Plunket Shield, Basin Reserve, 23 – 26 March 2016

Scorecard

I have ticked off an item on my cricketing wishlist by being at the Basin Reserve when Auckland won the Plunket Shield, the first time in my spectating half century that I have been present for the moment of victory in the domestic first-class competition.

Kent’s three County Championships in the seventies were all secured away from home, at the Oval, Edgbaston and Hove. Neither Canterbury nor Bristol—my most common end-of-season locations—were the venue for the away side to take the title when I was there, though my Blean correspondent was at St Lawrence when Durham claimed their first title, so has always had the advantage in this respect.

With only six teams in contention, you might think that shorter odds would have prevailed during my 19 New Zealand seasons, but not so, until now.

I was there for most of the first, third and fourth days, on for the final 90 minutes or so of day two.

Day 1

The penultimate round of the Plunket Shield, and Auckland, the leaders, visit second-placed Wellington. The home side are 23 points behind. Twenty points are the most that can be accrued from one match, so Wellington need to win (third-placed Canterbury are also in with a shout). Throw in a forecast of dodgy weather and it was no surprise to find a pitch as green and angry as the Incredible Hulk.

The pitch for the test against Australia here a few weeks ago was also described as green, but in comparison was merely a truculent off-yellow. Then, given skilful guidance by Haslewood and Siddle, the ball did just enough. As I noted at the time, few balls beat the bat or found the edge on that first morning apart from those that took wickets.

This one, however, was an English green top circa 1988, when moderate dobbers could trundle up, present the seam and pick off good batsmen. Auckland—put in, obviously—took the view that dogged defence would be futile on a day when a ball with a batsman’s name on it was around every corner. Every opportunity to garner any available runs was taken.

The outcome was 152 all out from 34 overs. Brent Arnel (who, to be fair, is more than a dobber) finished with five for 51. Auckland’s Butch-and-Sundance approach to overwhelming odds against them was justified, all the more so when Wellington’s more cautious approach failed to protect its batsmen. Only 27 runs came from the first 13 overs, but three wickets fell nevertheless.

However, after tea the greenness faded and the pitch lost just enough pace to turn it from challenging to good for playing strokes. Michael Pollard and Scott Borthwick of Durham put on 73 for the fourth wicket. Borthwick was impressive and it was a surprise when he chipped a soft catch to mid-wicket. Pollard rode his luck.

Play was ended by bad light. As is customary, this came at the point when the batsmen appeared to be seeing the ball better than at any time during the day. Wellington were 22 behind with four wickets standing.

Day 2

Wellington made 236 in their first innings, and by the time I arrived for the last 90 minutes of the day, Auckland were within 25 of negating the lead, without loss. The pitch was still tinged with green and there was some movement, but it was on the fast lane to being the usual batman’s paradise that Basin pitches tend to become by the end of the second day. There was plenty of loose bowling too.

Not that you would have known it from the whooping and hollering of the Wellington fielders, mundane dot balls lauded as if they were bursting with fiendish cunning. I’m all for positivity, but the danger here is that the bowlers come to believe that they are better than they really are.

I was at Seddon Park in Hamilton for CricInfo one day about 15 years ago, when we were joined in the press box by Glenn Turner and John Parker, teammates for Worcestershire as well as New Zealand. The conversation turned to the feedback that technology offers to modern players. “Our bowlers had feedback” said one. “It came from Norman Gifford at short leg and tended to be along the lines of ‘what are you bowling that crap for?’”  Different days.

No wickets fell before light again intervened with batting looking as easy as the Sun crossword. Auckland were 73 ahead.

Day 3

It takes some time to put on all the layers necessary to withstand a day in the southerly at the Basin, so I arrived only just in time to see Michael Guptill-Bunce reach his hundred, the second of his first-class career. A cousin of Martin Guptill, but somewhat shorter, Guptill-Bunce has an open stance and shots on both sides of the pitch. These he displayed with ever greater freedom as he progressed to 189 before falling a leading edge to cover from the first delivery with the second new ball.

Earlier, his first-wicket partnership with Jeet Ravel, worth 215, had ended when McPeake removed Ravel’s off stump. Ravel has often been mentioned when the perpetual vacancy at the top of the order in the test team is being discussed, but has not been picked thus far. He has had another good summer.

I would move Martin Guptill down the order to fill the gap created by Brendon McCullum’s retirement. Away from the torment of the new ball, Guptill would become the test batsman that his one-day achievements promise him to be. The gap between Plunket Shield and test cricket is huge, but Ravell’s consistency puts him at the head of the line to open the innings with Tom Latham (now of Kent, I am pleased to note).

With a draw almost certain to be enough to give Auckland the Shield, there was no question of a declaration. A queue formed of Auckland batsman eager to make the most of a pitch that had transformed from cornered tiger to purring tabby, eager to encourage strokes.

Mark Chapman (whose parents, we may summise, are not Beatles fans), hit a breezy, run-a-ball 73. Colin de Grandhomme’s 33 was as quick. At the close Donovan Grobbelaar was 89 not out. His innings contained as good a display of precision straight driving as I have seen for a long time; shot after shot missing the bowler’s stumps by a just a few centimetres.

A little over two years ago, Scott Borthwick was picked by England as a leg spinner, and has a test bowling average of 20.50 to show for his sole appearance at Sydney. He has been one of the highest scorers in county cricket over the past three years, but the bowling has fallen away. Borthwick wasn’t given a proper spell until Auckland had passed 400; he was tidy but unthreatening, which is not a bad report for a leggie on this pitch.

Of course, every leg spinner wants to be Shane Warne, and rightly so. They may not be able to bowl like he did, but they can mimic Warne’s theatricality. Borthwick is a star in this respect. When any ball is not met by the absolute middle of the bat, he gives us his Hamlet, a moving portrayal of the injustice of the human condition. Just like Shane Warne.  Until he lets go of the ball, at least.

Day 4

This was the day on which Auckland would probably win the Plunket Shield for the first time in seven seasons. Unless Wellington produced an improbable win, or Canterbury beat Northern Districts (which also seemed unlikely), it would be theirs by dinner time.

Grobbelaar completed his century and captain Michael Bates set about enjoying himself. He hit Borthwick for four and three sixes off successive deliveries. Never fear; when the final ball of the over was defended, Borthwick reached deep into his repertoire of pain to convince us that the rest of the over had been no more than an administrative oversight.

Auckland’s total of 598 was the highest in a domestic game at the Basin. Wellington‘s target was 515 at about six an over, the tallest of orders even on such a benign surface. There was no doubt that they would give it a go.

By lunch they had reached a solid 68 for one from 19 overs, though it would have been two had the perfect Nethula googly that bowled Murdoch not been a no ball, one of three the leg spinner bowled in his first two overs. The luck continued to run with Wellington and Murdoch after the interval. A top edge could have been caught by either mid on or deep mid-wicket, but with exquisite politeness they left it to each other. They probably laughed about it later, but not at the time. The second-wicket partnership between Murdoch and Woodcock was worth 144 when Murdoch was bowled by Nethula.

Any residual hope disappeared after tea, with the loss of four wickets for 23 runs. To their credit, Wellington focused on saving the game. An eighth-wicket stand of 60 between Verma and Blundell was central to enabling them to do so. Verma remained unbeaten at the end.

The end of the game at the expiry of the 16 overs compulsory in the final hour was not quite the moment of triumph, as play was still in progress in Christchurch. But Canterbury had given up hope at about the same time as Wellington and had been blocking for an hour, so it was as good as. I had expected scenes of uninhibited joy and emotion, but not so. The two teams lined up, shook hands and left the field, and that was that. It was much like I expect it was at the Oval in 1970; Colin Cowdrey proffering an outstretched hand and Micky Stewart calling for three cheers.

Nevertheless, I am happy to be able to give the ultimate affirmation of the sports fan: I was there.

Vintage Summer 2015

John Arlott’s Vintage Summer 1947 was one of the first cricket books I owned. Written 20 years after the event, it is the great commentator’s memoire of the second post-war season, his first as a full-time commentator and reporter. By the time he wrote the book Arlott was established as one of Britain’s best wine writers; “vintage” was his highest bestowment of approval.

Arlott had spent most of the Second World War as a policeman in Southampton, dodging the bombs and dealing with the detritus that war washes up on civilised shores. Two years after peace, he spent the summer watching cricket and counting it as work. His pleasure at this personal liberation suffuses the pages and there is a sense that the country as a whole was breathing out, at last.

Cricket grounds were packed: 14,500 wedged into the College Ground at Cheltenham for the Championship decider between Gloucestershire and Middlesex. A third of that today and the ground would be thought full. Forty-six thousand paid at the gate to join the members during the five days of Canterbury Week.

There was some wonderful cricket, much of it from the Middlesex pair of Denis Compton and Bill Edrich, both of whom scored an unprecedented 3,000 runs, carefree, and dashing, and including six centuries between them in the tests against South Africa.

I went to a talk by Compton at the County Ground in Bristol in the early 90s, and saw boyhood adoration in the rheumy eyes of those who had seen him play, though some had the decency to be as appalled as I was at their hero’s shameful racism.

Which have been my vintage summers?

The sun-drenched salad days of the mid-seventies are certainly among them. In 1975 I saw hundreds for Clive Lloyd in the first World Cup Final, and Colin Cowdrey against the Australians in the same week.

In 1976 I was there for double and single hundreds, both of pure silk, by Zaheer Abbas in Canterbury Week; Holding’s demolition of England on an Oval featherbed; a Lord’s final win for Kent, all but denied by a one-legged D’Oliveira fifty; and a helicopter bringing the Sunday League trophy to Maidstone as rivals faltered in the last moments of the season. The early years of the new century are there too, when I was CricInfo's man in the North Island. Like John Arlott, I could barely believe that I was being paid to watch cricket and report on it.

But 2015 topped them all. It presented as pure a distillation of remarkable cricket as it would be possible to conceive or hope for; cricket that was better than any that I have seen before or, unless I am very lucky, will see again.

Here are some of the features that made it an unmatched vintage.

The summer of Sangakkara

The great Sri Lankan batsman Kumar Sangakkara said farewell to Wellington with a test double hundred and two one-day hundreds. The double century was a masterpiece of technique and restraint. The second half of the innings was made with the tail for company, but he farmed the strike as efficiently as a Dutch tulip farmer and still scored at four an over.  

At the Cake Tin during the pre-World Cup one day series, he peeled off a hundred with the nonchalance of a high roller taking a thousand dollars from his stash. Made at just over a run a ball, it set New Zealand a target that was too much on the day.

Best of all was his 70-ball century against England in the World Cup. Poor England. In their old-fashioned way, they thought that 309 offered maximum security, but it turned out to be an open prison out of which Sri Lanka could saunter at will. Sangakkara’s century was his fastest in ODIs, one of four consecutive hundreds he made in the World Cup, but he was no more than toying with the England attack. Victory came in the 48^th over, but it could have been ten overs earlier if he had felt like it.

To see one of the greatest batsmen in the history of cricket displaying his full brilliance would be enough to make any summer a vintage one.

Williamson and Watling’s world record

Kane Williamson’s batting in 2015 gave us an inkling of what watching Bradman must have been like.

Please understand that I am not being so foolish as to say that Williamson is the new Bradman. That would need a touch of the sun well beyond what is available here in Wellington. But the relentless rationality that Williamson brought to the crease in 2015 (it produced a test average of 90 or so for the year; Bradmanesque, some might say) must have been about the closest we have seen to the Don’s human algorithm for a long time: a run-scoring answer to almost every ball, but usually low-risk, rarely flashy and never extravagant (except when driving a six to win a game against Australia with one wicket to fall); timing and placement rather than power and effort. Of course, Bradman kept it up for twenty years, that’s the difference.

He began at the Basin during the test against Sri Lanka during the first week of the year. After a first-innings 69—it was a surprise when he was out, as it always is these days—in the second innings Williamson was established again, but with wickets falling around him. Soon, only five remained, the lead a mere 24.

Williamson addressed the situation by ignoring it. As the finest batsmen do, he responded to each ball by assessing its merit and acting accordingly. As commentators have noted, he does this no matter what form of the game he is playing. It sounds straightforward, but only a very good player bring it off.

Williamson and BJ Watling put on an unbroken 365 for the sixth wicket, a new test record. Remarkably, the existing record was created at the Basin less than a year before, by Brendon McCullum and Watling against India. So Watling joined Bradman, Hammond and Ames as the only players to break their own world partnership record (at least since the early days of test cricket when it must have happened more often).

The earlier stand had saved the game; this one won it, establishing BJ Watling as the lost Tracy brother in terms of rescuing impossible situations. In this era of batsmen-keepers, he is as good as anybody behind the stumps. Yet when the journalists and websites picked their end-of-year World XIs only the Australian writer Chloe Saltau (of those I have seen) picked Watling as wicketkeeper. He is the forgotten hero of New Zealand cricket.

In fifty years’ time people will look at the scorecard of the Basin Reserve test of 2015 and will say “A win from a deficit of 135 on first innings, a world record and double hundreds by two of the finest batsmen ever to play the game. Anybody who saw that game was pretty lucky”. So we were.

A great day at the Cake Tin (1)

The World Cup group match between New Zealand and England was among the best days I have spent at the cricket, and certainly the most astonishing. I have watched the highlights every few weeks since and it enthralls every time.

With England 107 for three batting first, the game had fewer than 20 overs to run, that’s how astonishing it was. This came about because of two extraordinary performances.

Tim Southee’s seven for 33 was the best one-day bowling I have seen. I have thought about this and looked through Wisden for alternatives. The Yorkshire slow left-armer Don Wilson’s six for 18 at Canterbury in the first year of the Sunday League was the previous best, statistically at least (it was one of the great Kent collapses: 70 for one becomes 105 all out). Joel Garner at the ’79 World Cup final? Derek Underwood most Sundays? Not as good as Southee at the Cake Tin this day.

The ball in Southee’s hands was an obedient shepherd’s dog. Four of the seven were bowled, each with the ball no more than grazing the off stump.

I’m not one for atmosphere at the cricket, generally speaking. I’d choose the quiet hum of the Mote or Pukekura Park a quarter full over a throbbing stadium almost any day, but it was great to be at the Cake Tin to hear Southee’s name sang out just as Richard Hadlee’s was thirty years ago.

Southee’s performance would have been enough to put that day on this list. What followed ranks it as a contender for the day, of all the days over the past fifty years, that I would most like to watch again.

Brendon McCullum went about the pursuit of the modest target of 124 as if it were a silent film heroine tied to the train tracks awaiting urgent rescue. For Anderson, Broad and Finn having an opening batsmen charging towards them like a pocket Trumper was utterly disconcerting. A run rate of 15 an over in a 50 over match. It was magnificent in its temerity.

A wonderful day.

A great day at the Cake Tin (2)

Martin Guptill caressed the first ball of the match to the straight boundary and the World Cup quarter-final between New Zealand and the West Indies was under way. In its way, Guptill’s innings was even more remarkable than McCullum’s, not just for its prolificacy.

It was paced quite beautifully and there was hardly a shot that the MCC coaching book wouldn’t be proud of. Guptill’s century came up in 111 balls with 12 fours but no sixes. Only then did he put the foot down, roaring out of sight leaving behind a dust cloud of extraordinary numbers: 137 in 52 balls with 12 more fours…and 11 sixes.

And all with lovely, pure cricket strokes. I have been trying to decide who Guptill reminded me of that day, without reaching a convincing answer. Cowdrey? Too much power. Not the brutality of Viv Richards. Not as rugged as Gooch. Then yesterday I read this:

…cricket of elegant classicism, of economy of movement, of touch and precision rather than brawn. But then I also remembered how he pervaded a crease rather than simply occupying it, and how he obtained such power from such a minuscule backlift, barely a flex of the wrists.

That’s it. Apart from the bit about the miniscule backlift, that could be a description of Martin Guptill in the World Cup quarter-final. In fact, it is Gideon Haigh on Martin Crowe, whose death has inspired some fine writing. There is no finer compliment for a New Zealand batsman than to say that he reminds the spectator of Crowe, especially Guptill, whose mentor Crowe was.

At the Basin test a couple of weeks ago I sat next to someone who dismissed Guptill’s innings as being made against poor bowling. Well, up to a point, but let us give Guptill some credit for making them bowl badly. It was a World Cup quarter final and there was immense pressure on the batsman to which he responded magnificently (the same man reckoned the McCullum’s triple hundred was made against bent bowling, so perhaps I am paying him too much attention).

More McCullum

Only once during that great day against England did I actually gasp at what was occurring out there. Not at a Southee wicket, a McCullum six or even Adam Milne’s brilliant boundary catch. It was when McCullum placed the sixth close catcher for Morgan.

Six close catchers in a 50-over game; something I have not seen before and am unlikely to see again, unless McCullum’s disregard for the conventions of captaincy becomes contagious. Who else would have bowled his lead bowler out as McCullum did that day? It won the game.

Nor would many captains have declared as early as he did at the Basin test, giving Sri Lanka, Sangakkara and all, a glimpse of victory, staking the series lead on a greater chance of winning the test.

McCullum’s compulsion to audaciousness was one of the defining features of 2015. Batting with resilience, style, panache, and charged with TNT. Bowling that was perfect. And leadership that sailed over the horizon to confound the flat Earth sceptics. A vintage summer indeed, the best in half a century.