A back-breaking loss
Australia prove themselves to be hoodoo gurus, and some outsourced stories from a lost weekend
Way to suck the last, waning rays of sunshine from our summer, Alex Carey, Mitchell Marsh and the peerless Pat Cummins.
Day four at Hagley Oval yesterday started with abnormal and in hindsight misguided waves of optimism that the Australian hoodoo would be broken, but ended like every other match on this wretched tour has, with the winning beers being drunk in the visiting changing rooms.
At least the final match was drama-filled and interesting; the type of contest we hoped for and haven’t had since the opening T20I in Wellington a lifetime ago.
I’ve spent too much time in a car and away from the television over the past three days to get too granular about this particular test, and somehow I’ve managed to strain something in my back while stuck in gridlock on the Waikato ‘Expressway’, so I have to keep this short-ish and general. There were, however, some uncanny parallels to last summer’s blockbuster series against England.
As they were last year, New Zealand spent just shy of a test-and-a-half being outclassed and frankly embarrassed by a superior team, before showing they still have enough good players and ticker to fight back to make things competitive.
Against England it was just good enough to snatch a drawn series; against Australia, Matt Henry picked the team up on his square shoulders and dragged them to within a few wickets of a famous win, but couldn’t find anybody to finish the job for him.
New Zealand will look back and rue their collective performance in this series because Australia were more vulnerable than most realised. The jolt the West Indies gave them at the Gabba was not necessarily an anomaly. Sure, they might have one of the best-balanced, most skilful bowling attacks in test history, but seldom has their batting been so flimsy.
Australia have always felt a wicket or two from an industrial-scale collapse, but three out of four innings they found a heroic figure or a partnership: Cam Green (and Josh Hazlewood) in Wellington; Marnus Labuschange in the first innings in Christchurch and Marsh-Carey (with a splash of Cummins) in the chase.
New Zealand fumbled too many key moments, and fluffed too many big decisions. This series highlighted some deficiencies in the team’s on- and off-field leadership and, as difficult as it is to acknowledge it, the ‘golden generation’ is well and truly over.
That being said, with New Zealand’s shallow talent pool and resources, the answer is never a wholesale clean-out as was suggested to me by a couple of mates over the weekend. This is not a salary-cap sport where you build a successful team and when it starts to slide you tear it down and rebuild through a draft.
New Zealand have done well over the last decade by replacing through attrition and allowing new players, many of whom had already enjoyed long first-class careers, to learn how to play test cricket alongside experienced and skilful practitioners.
Some have taken to test cricket like a veritable duck to a pond, think Daryl Mitchell and Devon Conway, others less so, but we can’t just magic up a new team out of the Plunket Shield or the NZ ‘A’ programme, whose value I believe has always been overstated.
There are no obvious young champions kicking down the doors. In fact, if you watched New Zealand’s recent Under-19 World Cup you would know there are some fundamental issues (particularly around the bowling and playing of spin) that lie deep in the bowels of our age-group and high-performance systems.
New Zealand is not a cricket country, like Australia and especially India, that churns out can’t-miss prospects.
In my adulthood of covering cricket (since 1996), I can recall the successful emergence of four can’t-miss prospects. Three were from Northern Districts and were talked up as teens, made the senior side while they were still getting the hang of shaving and developed into world-class operators: Daniel Vettori, Tim Southee and Kane Williamson.
The fourth was a much older South African immigrant whose run-scoring exploits at Wellington were so compelling it was taken as a given they would continue at the highest level. Devon Conway, even accounting for his post-World Cup blip, has made good on that promise.
And that’s about it. Other New Zealand greats and very goods of the era all came with caveats.
It was not certain that Ross Taylor’s technique would cope with the demands of test cricket.
Ditto for Craig McMillan.
Shane Bond had a spine that was prone to cracking.
There were question marks over Brendon McCullum’s technique and temperament.
Trent Boult seemed too slight to be a world-class new-ball bowler.
Kyle Jamieson was a late bloomer.
Mark Richardson was an even later bloomer.
Was BJ Watling a grafting opener or a keeper-batter?
Was Tom Latham a keeper-batter or a grafting opener?
Neil Wagner profiled as a squad-filling role player.
Aside from the ones mentioned above, Martin Guptill was close to being labelled “can’t-miss” while emerging from Auckland’s west as a precociously clean striker of the ball. He went two-thirds of cricket’s formats towards fulfilling that label.
Cricketers like Adam Milne, Will Young, Glenn Phillips and Rachin Ravindra created buzz on the age-group scene without quite hitting the heights of teen prodigy.
That’s by no means an exhaustive list, but it does demonstrate that in New Zealand we tend to have to build cricketers; they don’t come prepackaged.
If you look around the first-class scene now, there are a few decent young prospects, but would you consider any of Adi Ashok, Jacob Cumming or Muhammad Abbas can’t miss? All got a lot of age-group chatter, but there is already a fear Ashok, who has played three senior internationals, has been pushed too far, too fast, and Cumming, fine prospect that he is, has scored one first-class 50 in 15 matches.
Abbas has made the brightest start to his first-class career, but not a knocking-down-the-door start.
Again, nothing about this is exhaustive. There might be hidden jewels in all sorts of places that require a bit of polishing, but the point remains that any rebuild will need to be incremental, not dramatic and, in fairness, that is what’s happening at the moment. There were just three players, Southee, Williamson and Latham, on the field at Hagley that played the WTC final at the Rose Bowl, though Jamieson and Conway would have too if fit.
It’s not the need to rebuild that has been ignored, it’s the quality of the renovation that has been the issue.
So, to address the specific, most pressing questions that have emerged in the wake of the 0-2 test series defeat.
What to do with Tim Southee?
How to address the selection failings?
Do they need to look at a new keeper?
How do they rescue the collapse in fielding standards?
1. It has been an utterly miserable test summer for the champion swing bowler, with just six wickets at an eye-watering average of 71 and a strike rate of a wicket every 21 overs. He’s never been quick but he has had the capability of reaching back for some pace when required, but not this summer - it has been military medium all the way. At the age of 35 and with close to 3800 test overs under his belt, it’s hard to see him regaining any lost kph.
Allied to his bowling struggles, we’ve seen his brilliant set of hands start to drop catches, and he has played whatever the polar opposite of captain’s knocks with the bat are (he should look to his Australian counterpart to see a limited batter who always tries to play the right innings for the right moment). Most critically, his on-field leadership has faltered at critical times, none more so than that gruesome second morning at the Basin.
Looking at it from a distance, having a captain-coach leadership axis of two men with conservative outlooks appears doomed to condemn the Black Caps to mediocrity.
Southee deserved a shot at the captaincy. For a while it worked nicely. It feels the right time to go in a different direction and to see if Southee might rediscover a playing spark as a squad player under a younger, less world-weary captain. Southee himself was non-commital as to whether he would be at the helm when the team leaves for tests in Sri Lanka later this year.
“We’ll see, we go to Asia and the make-up of the side changes slightly, with spin becoming the main threat in that part of the world,” Southee said. “We’ll see when we get there. We’ll deal with this… and then look to move forward to what’s to come later.”
Who his potential replacement might be is a riddle. It is highly unlikely Williamson would take the job back, though he is clearly the best qualified. Latham would be a safety-first kind of skipper who has just emerged from a long form rut himself, while Mitchell Santner can’t buy a regular place in the test team and hasn’t overly impressed while skippering in limited overs.
Unless you’re going to risk a Lee Germon scenario, where a captain was brought in from outside the squad, alienating a bunch of regulars in the process, the choices are thin. Tom Blundell might have been considered an option, but we’ll get to him soon. Phillips and Ravindra need to polish their games before they could be considered.
Daryl Mitchell, anybody?
Maybe not after these admittedly weird comments triggered a few pundits.
“We’ve always said as Black Caps, we’re not defined by the outcomes,” he said. “We’re defined by how we play cricket and hopefully how we inspire our country to play the game... we are really proud of the efforts throughout the test.”
While I know what he was awkwardly trying to say, the truth of the matter is tests are 100 percent defined by outcomes.
2. To say that the Stead-Sam Wells era has got off to a rocky start would be an understatement.
There were nonsensical reasons given for persevering with the chronically out-of-form Henry Nicholls, and then when he did repay the faith, two tests later, one of which was played in hopelessly substandard batting conditions, he was gone.
There was the mind boggling misreading of conditions at Hamilton and Wellington, which led to an inability to balance the team. A part-time spin bowling batter was picked at number seven, followed in Hamilton by four number 10s batting from eight to eleven. Only Kane Williamson prevented New Zealand being beaten by a South African Invitational XI. It does not reflect well on the off-field leadership group when visiting teams are less confused about who and how to play than the hosts.
There remains the bloodyminded determination to allow Young to keep flailing as a back-up opener.
But the icing on the cake was the unholy mess that was the Neil Wagner situation. Count me among the number who believed the time was right to phase Wagner out of the test team, but to have him tacked on to the edges of the squad and then overlook him in favour of 32-year-old Scott Kuggeleijn was a decision so baffling it must have been cooked up at a mescaline ceremony. Watching Wagner playing with his kids on the Basin post-test, having previously witnessed Kuggeleijn attempting but failing to photocopy his patented short-ball attack was one of those surreal moments that defy rational explanation.
Stead and Wells, alongside NZC high-performance manager Bryan Stronach, need to have some hard and brutally honest conversations. They haven’t been good enough.
3. Number six is a big-time batting position and it was one Blundell appeared to be built for about 18 months ago. Since then it has been an epic struggle.
Since the start of the last home summer, Blundell has been so poor it’s inevitable that questions will be asked as to whether it is an irreversible decline.
His overall record remains very good for a keeper-batter, so I’d propose he stay in the test XI, but drop to number seven or eight in the order. Number six is one of those fulcrum positions that needs to be equally adept at rescue missions or stepping on throats and at the moment, Blundell is incapable of doing either.
4. The collapse of New Zealand’s fielding prowess has been spectacular. From one of the best fielding units in the world to a step above woeful in the space of a year or two. Some of the catches that have been spilled this summer would have a high school 1st XI coach booking into Ashley & Martin.
As brutal as it sounds, Ravindra probably dropped the series yesterday when he spilled a simple chance off Mitchell Marsh. It was a simple chance but it wasn’t even that surprising to see it hit grass.
BJ Watling, fielding coach?
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That’s the men’s international home summer done with. It was, on the whole, a bit rubbish, but I’ll probably have more to say on that later. In the meantime, thanks for reading and listening to my Black Caps’ cricket content, especially whose paying subscriptions help keep this machine ticking over! Thanks too for all the comments and thoughts. I’ve let you talk among yourselves lately, but I love to see it.
For now, I’ve already broken my promise to myself that I would keep this short, so I’m about to lie on a hard, flat floor for a while, and start catching up on the myriad other sports I missed over the weekend.
Luckily, others were there to watch for me:
The Crusaders are 0-3. Ding-dong, is the dynasty dead?
While it is no bad thing for Super Rugby Pacific to have rid itself of the inevitability of the Crusaders winning the title again, and it’s good to see a bit of tribal pride emerging, no one should be celebrating that the defending champions are not delivering the same high-intensity, high-quality rugby for which they are famed.
The sustained excellence of the Crusaders has been vital in driving standards across the competition. It has been the Crusaders who have held every other team accountable to produce improvements.
After Joseph Parker’s impressive win over Zhilei Zhang, is it Parker v Anthony Joshua Pt II?
Immediately after Joshua knocked out Francis Ngannou in a stunning performance in the main event, the former two-time world champion, who is also on his way back to the top, left no doubt about his respect for Parker.
“Parker, for me, I think of the heavyweights he will go down in history,” Joshua told IFL TV. “He’s one you can learn from.
“He’s had his trials and tribulations and he just comes back stronger and stronger. Obviously, I’ll fight him if I need to, but aside from that, I take my hat off to him.”
What?! Did you really expect the Warriors to make life easy for us?
Webster didn’t hold back after the lacklustre second half performance.
“Discipline let us down, for sure. Our first 20 minutes were outstanding,” he said. “Our style of play, what we were doing. I thought our attack was... simple and fast, but then we just gave away yardage, penalties - four, two for offside, two for getting the ruck wrong - [and] we invited them back into the game
“The period after halftime was... poor. Our defence, our ruck control, it just wasn’t good enough.”
On a related issue, I had this interesting note from subscriber Ben (lightly edited):
Went to the Warriors last night which was mainly a great atmosphere. Fun halftime light-show, good music and the Pukana-cam all added to a great vibe.
However, someone had the brilliant idea of getting rid of the iconic drummers (there since day one) and have substituted them for a punishing PA announcer that overnight killed the “Up the Wahs” catchphrase (RIP).
In each half, four to five times the announcer tried to force-feed an “Up the Wahs” chant that was simply awful. The phrase worked because it was organic, cool and genuine - last night you could feel the collective eye-rolls every time the crowd was asked to chant it. It was forced fun and cringe, especially when they also tried a painful Warr-iors chant as well, which sounded like a sad drone.
I’m with Ben. Come on Warriors, you don’t need this bollocks. This is a crowd famous for feeding off its own energy, so let it do so.
Yeah, it's funny (not funny) how much you realise that the Black Caps woeful fielding this summer has impacted the results. It's like an attitude barometer; we can forgive them a bit more when you watch them loosing skin chasing everything down and snaffling half chances. But when you witness catches falling between bemused fielders and regulation stuff getting shelled it makes for a tough watch. Embarrassing even.
I can live with the lack of depth on the bowling/batting front. We've always been in that position. But shit fielding?
Nathan Smith is one that I would have loved to have seen get an opportunity at some point during this home summer. His first-class stats are pretty appealing (averaging 27 with both bat and ball - clearly better in both roles than the six-years-older Kuggeleijn). A subcontinent tour is probably not the best way to bring him in, but I hope his time will come in the not-too-distant future.
I know I have my non-cricketing reasons for not enjoying seeing Kuggeleijn representing our national team, so I'm hardly objective, but I hope we've established now that he's not the guy.