A note or two from the 'Tin
An all-cricket newsletter, including the Warner crowd conundrum that isn't and the BYC on Kane's 'minnow bashing'.
NZ 215 for 3 (20 overs)
Australia 216 for 4 (20 overs)
That was a bit of a hoot in Wellington last night, though I fear it might prove to be New Zealand’s best chance of nicking a game off the defending world T20 champions.
Without wanting to sound like a curmudgeon, there was a lot of caveman cricket played in Australia’s thrilling final-ball win, with Wellington’s long straight boundaries and short square ones making the cross-bat slog the shot du jour.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. In the shortest format you have to access the boundary in the easiest way possible and if that means essaying pulls and slogs to the sides that measure a piffling 58 and 62 metres, then that’s what you do. It might not marry up to my aesthetic but there are plenty of others who find a brutal beauty in the hoick over deep midwicket.
With the exception of Lockie Ferguson, New Zealand’s attempt at defending 215 was, literally, misguided.
One of the more boring clarion calls in limited overs matches is “we just need to bowl more yorkers”. Pinpointing a yorker to a batter who remains fixed in the crease is difficult, doing so against a generation of players that shift across the crease and up and down the wicket is fiendishly hard. Even well-directed yorkers have a habit of being paddled for six. That’s why the modern yorker is aimed at the wide tramline on the offside, not the stumps.
This, however, was a game where the wide yorker hurt New Zealand in myriad ways.
Tim Southee couldn’t find the right side of it, nor could Ish Sodhi, resulting in New Zealand replaying too many deliveries. Twice when Adam Milne nudged against it it had calamitous results, first on the final ball of the 13th over, which Mitchell Marsh muscled it over the tiny point boundary for six and, most crucially, on the fourth ball of the 19th over.
As Milne ran in to bowl that ball, Australia needed 32 from nine legitimate deliveries and win predictors all had New Zealand well north of 80 percent.
It was actually a near flawless execution of a wide yorker, but Tim David toe-ended it to the third man boundary and the game was never the same again. Milne got spooked and lost his lengths, being hit for two sixes to end the over and Southee, at his pace against two huge hitters of the ball, was 50-50 at best to defend 15 in the final over.
That toe-ended four was emblematic of a game measured in millimetres: one of David’s late sixes hit the boundary toblerone on the full rather than the half volley; one of Southee’s wides looked fair; Marsh twice avoided being bowled by a coat of lacquer.
This is T20 though, you take the blows and move on because they go both ways. Rachin Ravindra and Devon Conway, 68 and a restorative 63 respectively, must have spooned the ball short of and between fielders a half-dozen times during their otherwise brilliant partnership.
What was a little harder to accept was the fielding. Ravindra, Southee and Glenn Phillips dropped catches, the latter making an unholy mess of a Marsh miscue when the Australian skipper was on 36, parrying a ball for six off the luckless Milne.
It was fitting of the occasion: a chaotic, sometimes ugly, always entertaining match of wildly swinging fortunes.
Off to Eden Park now, another ground whose silly boundaries to a large extent determine the mode of batting (and bowling), and where the crowd would be advised to wear helmets.