Big Interview PtII: 'I don't care if he bowls out his arse, he takes wickets!'
Jarrod Kimber talks all things Black Caps. PLUS: Sneak preview of tomorrow's guest essay on the Clearys; and the NRL is on a coke bender.
In Pt II of the big interview with global cricket journalist Jarrod Kimber we traverse his relationship with New Zealand cricket (small c), and the screenwriting technique he uses to write so perceptively about the qualities of smaller cricket-playing nations.
Kimber also explains how New Zealand’s faltering sports media industry has afforded him the opportunity to fill the gap in a market.
Questions (in bold) and answers have been abridged and edited for length and clarity.
You have produced a lot of work on the Black Caps recently. Is there a financial imperative to that or are you genuinely interested in their fortunes?
If you go to my YouTube page there’s something on Zimbabwean Ryan Burl’s shoes, then I've got something on an ODI from South Africa v Ireland, then I’m following the IPL, then I've got something on Pakistan-New Zealand-England. It’s really hard to cover all these things so what I do is, go, “OK, I’ve got to know the narrative of each team.”
At the moment, what’s the narrative of Sri Lanka? They’re an omnishambles. That’s all I need to know. Something is going to happen in Sri Lanka in the next year and I’m probably going to write about it and I know they’ve been an omnishambles for a long time now.
I have a narrative in my head for every team at all times. What I do is start to pay attention when I see an upward curve or a downward curve. With Pakistan there has been a bit of a downward curve, with New Zealand it’s been an upward curve. When you’re in the middle I’m not interested. When you're at the bottom or even the top I’m less interested. What I’m interested in is that journey up, or that journey down. How did South Africa go from being so good to so bad? How did New Zealand continue to get better over what is now a generation-and-a-half of players since Brendon McCullum took over.
I can’t cover New Zealand all the time because most of the time they’re not interesting. It’s the same with Australia. I haven’t written that much about Australia - outside of covering a series when I'm paid to do it - for the past couple of years because they are this weird middling team that isn’t going anywhere. Since Sandpapergate, the team has sort of been in the middle, so I don’t worry about that. If they get really good or fall off a cliff, I will start to look at them again.
With New Zealand, the 2015 World Cup was the first time when I thought, “Right, I have to keep an eye on them.”
When you talk about incentives, there’s no money in them. When I told my editors I was writing about New Zealand in 2015 and they were like, “What!? You don’t know what’s going to happen.” I was like, “They’re the story of this World Cup, even if they lose it. There’s nothing interesting about Australia winning this World Cup. They’re the best team at this World Cup, they’re playing at home and they’ve won a shitload of World Cups. New Zealand? This is their moment, their big chance and they’ve completely changed the way they play.”
In that period, 2015-2016, I reckon I wrote four features on Brendon McCullum that were all about 3000-4000 words. I was absolutely obsessed with him. If he was playing, I had the TV on. I still think that he and Shahid Afridi are the most visually stimulating cricketers I’ve ever watched. So when he was playing, I certainly got obsessed with New Zealand. From that point on they were completely on my radar, but I don't get paid to cover New Zealand.
Even this year in England, the World Test Championship, I got a contract for that, but I didn’t get a contract for the tests in England before that. I’m freelance these days so it’s different from when I was at Cricinfo and I could just say, “I’m going to the ground and I’m going to write.” Now I’ve got to get someone to pay me.
When you do what I do, the teams to write about are the interesting teams that have no coverage. South Africa is a really interesting team but they actually have brilliant cricket coverage. They have eight or nine high-quality, professional cricket writers. That’s their job. Maybe some of them occasionally write about rugby or football, but every time there’s a South African cricket news story they’re all over it.
You tell me, do you have to cover more than one sport?
I haven’t been a specialist cricket writer for a long time now. Never in the truest sense of it?
[Andrew] Alderson?
No, he covers all the Olympic sports and more.
[Mark] Geenty?
No, he edits and covers all sorts of things. Another allrounder. We have moved on from the days of there being cricket-only beat reporters in New Zealand.
Exactly. Cricinfo doesn’t have New Zealand cricket coverage. They have more now that Andrew McGlashan is based in Sydney and is also obsessed with New Zealand, but Cricbuzz doesn’t have a New Zealand reporter so the two biggest cricket websites don’t have a specialist.
So for me, it’s a perfect storm. When New Zealand gets good it’s like, “Great, I can write a bunch of articles.”
It’s not like I’m going, “I’m an expert on New Zealand cricket.” I’m trying to put New Zealand cricket into the context of the world game. You and Alderson and Geenty are all going to kill me as far as what you know about New Zealand cricket, I’d never pretend to compare, but my specialty is knowing about everything so when New Zealand, South Africa, Sri Lanka become the story I write the piece [for the big websites].
A lot of New Zealanders have been very kind to me over the past couple of years but I feel like I'm getting praise just for writing the piece. Look, don’t get me wrong, I'm happy if some of them are good, but I don't get that kind of praise from England when I write about them, or rarely from South Africa, certainly not from Australia, but these are places where they have full-time professional cricket writers and you just don’t get that in New Zealand.
It’s a crying shame that Cricinfo and Cricbuzz haven’t solved that problem yet and you and I both know the New Zealand sports media - I mean you just lost your sports radio station - is going down the shitter. Hopefully SEN changes things and the newspapers work out what they’re doing, but there’s a strong possibility no New Zealand newspaper will ever have a specialist cricket writer again.
I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit. What I think you’ve done very skilfully is write [or produce] the story in the way New Zealanders want to be seen without being patronising. We are stuck at the bottom of the world and we have had our hands up for quite a while now going, “Look at us, we’re not bad.” You’ve done that and that’s left many cricket fans here with that warm feeling that somebody from outside has noticed us.
Let’s start with the batting. You’d be very hard pressed not to say at the moment that it’s not the best batting lineup in the world. India’s middle order is stuttering at the moment, and that’s it, no one else can bat.
New Zealand can bat. It might be because everywhere around the world has [tricky] wickets but New Zealand is suddenly producing some of the flattest wickets on the planet. That might have something to do with it. But fundamentally, I can’t think of a better top six or seven in the world and yet that isn’t the narrative with New Zealand.
The seam bowling has taken over but that’s happened at a time when seam bowling has taken over everywhere, so it’s harder to see.
That’s where I start. People say India is better than New Zealand. I think India has a better one to 11 than New Zealand. They have much more variety because they have Ravi Jadeja and Ravi Ashwin available to them and they can probably win on any surface. If you were to ask me who’s the better team , I’d probably still go with India, but when you break it down you can see why New Zealand is the equal of India and beat them in the World Test Championship. It was not a fluke. It was done by being the best batting team in the world and having an incredible bowling lineup.
I once tweeted, probably about five or six years ago, that Neil Wagner was one of the best bowlers in the world. Oh my god, if you go to that Twitter thread, the amount of Indians and Australians correcting me. I’m like, “Guys, here’s the record over the past two years and here’s what he’s done. “Oh, but he only bowls slow bouncers,” they say. I don’t care if he bowls out his arse, he’s taking wickets!
Then you’ll say BJ Watling is arguably in the top one or two keeper-batters in the world and again, you get “Look at how slow he bats,” and “He doesn’t have the impact Quinton de Kock has.” Yeah, but guys he’s better than Jos Buttler who we never stop talking about, and Matthew Wade - everyone knows Wade’s name and he can’t make a run. Watling had all those guys covered.
That kind of stuff keeps happening to New Zealand.
I’ll go back to a comment you said that was really interesting: when you say I write about New Zealand in the way they want to be written about, I’m not a journalist in a traditional sense. I studied film writing. I never went to university, I never worked for a newspaper. I was a filmmaker who learned screenwriting mostly through reading scripts. What you get to understand about screenwriting is that it is telling a person’s story in their way. There’s a natural empathy in that. You’re really trying to show people in the correct light in the context of where they are.
When Sri Lanka beat India in the World T20 final, I wrote that people were going to see it as just another cricket game but it is important to remember the disparities about what Sri Lanka is as a country and what India is as a country. Sri Lanka is not good at any other sport, ever. They don’t win Olympic medals, they are not part of the global political discourse. Most of the most famous Sri Lankans in the world are people that have been brought up in England or Canada or Australia. It’s important to remember that when we talk about Sri Lanka because this is the biggest thing that is going to happen to them in a very long time, until hopefully the next time they win something like this. About 90 percent of the people said this is great, you’re right, we can’t believe we won this, and then you get the 10 percent of people who say you’re patronising. I had it with Sri Lanka, New Zealand, I’ve even had it with Australia. But no, you’ve got to work out where these guys fit in on the world stage.
You look at the way Australia put Don Bradman on a pedestal. Of course it did. [It was a] country that barely existed in the wider world and suddenly it had a guy who was the best in the world at something. So Australia turns Bradman into an icon. Bradman is one of two people in Australia where you can’t use their name to promote products, the other one is Mary MacKillop, our saint. The post office box number for the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] in all the state capitals is 9994, after Bradman’s test average [99.94]. He is literally wedded into Australian culture and that’s because, outside of Errol Flynn, nobody knew who Australians were in 1933. We were some big island in the middle of nowhere.
You can see that with New Zealand and the Lord of the Rings. New Zealand didn’t invent Lord of the Rings. It just happened to be that some great New Zealand director comes through - I actually have the Bad Taste poster behind me; I’m old school when it comes to [Peter] Jackson - and makes the movies, but for New Zealanders there is a pride that we are now that thing.
You have to understand that. Bangladesh, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan - these are not well-known countries in the world and cricket has given them the opportunity to grow and become more well known and develop. Once you start thinking about that, it’s almost like you’re writing about them as a person at that point.
So what is New Zealand as a person? It was the little brother that nobody gave a shit about for ages who, when they got good, people still didn’t care. That period in the ’80s, they were a genuinely top cricket team but people were like, “Well we’ve got the West Indies and Pakistan are really good so we don’t care, and plus England and Australia are bad, so that’s the only reason New Zealand are good.”
That’s changed a bit with the WTC win. You did some lovely stuff around that where you painted the picture of where New Zealand had come from in a cricket sense to get there, pointing to the fact that most of our best players in the early days - the Dempsters, Donnellys and Cowies - barely had any opportunities to play for their country.
It’s an incredible cricket culture that is part of growing the game globally. New Zealand has done things that are remarkable considering the population and the amount of people in the country who actually play cricket. There are probably more players on the maidan in Mumbai as we speak than there are cricketers in New Zealand.
That is a long journey to get from there to No 1. I’m not saying “Isn’t it great the little team has done well,” I’m saying, “We need to pay attention.”
It’s very hard to talk about cricket and not talk about the nations they come from and the cricket journeys that the nations have had. A lot of people don’t like that because they just want to hear who won and who lost, but that’s not really my thing.
I can see Cleary now
The Penrith Panthers meet the South Sydney Rabbitohs on Sunday night at Suncorp Stadium. It will be Penrith coach Ivan Cleary’s third trip to the big dance as a coach, the second with his son Nathan. The first time he went there it was, you will recall, with the Warriors in 2011.
Tomorrow in The Bounce, Trevor McKewen, one of the men responsible for bringing him to the Warriors as a player in 2000, writes about the qualities that make Cleary the coach he is, and about the what-might-have-been pangs that every Warriors fan should feel.
Here’s a little taster.
“Hugh McGahan and I signed Ivan to the Warriors as a player in late 1999 at the urging of coach Mark Graham who had run out of patience with Matthew Ridge and released the Kiwi fullback from the final year of his contract.
“‘Sharko’ wanted a goal-kicking outside back and a leader to replace the irascible Ridge. Ivan, in the last year of his contract with the Sydney City Roosters, became our target. Cleary was no blistering centre (he also played fullback). In fact, there was very little flash to his game. But he was massively dependable and exactly what Graham needed in a young side flush with emerging but green Kiwi talent including midfield partner Clinton Toopi, wingers Francis Meli and Henry Fa’afili and the likes of Ali Lauit’iti and Monty Betham in the forward pack.”
The NRL is on the nosebag!
First Reece Walsh, then a few players from the Melbourne Storm. Yes, the NRL is in the midst of a cocaine crisis.
There are calls for the introduction of hair follicle testing to catch the good-time Charlies, but are these the sort of drugs cheats you want to be investing money in to catch. Surely the sport’s job is to catch performing-enhancing drug cheats and it’s the police’s job to catch criminal recreational drug users.
I can think of another more cost-effective method of resolving the damaging public relations issue: put your bloody phones away.