Cricket's precarious toehold on summer
Guptill's dumping and defection another sign that all is not well
New Zealand Cricket is in a strange, unsatisfactory place at the moment, caught in a malaise with a fading generation of stars and a confused, unsustainable and in many ways immature professional cricket environment.
That might sound like a strange statement given that the concept of “amateurism” in first-class cricket was put to bed in 1963, but the immaturity reflects how haphazardly cricket has responded to India’s burgeoning status as a global economic superpower and the sport’s place in the entertainment matrix.
Cricket is suddenly a sport with a thousand questions and very few answers. Bilateral series lacking context are sucking the life out of the game and the interest out of players. When players and coaches show such obvious contempt for this hollow cricket (“it’s about building for the next World Cup”, you see), the fans follow suit. In Australia this week, 10,406 people paid to see the home team thrash its greatest rival, England, in an one-day international at a ground with a capacity of 100,000.
Cricket is the closest thing Australia has to a national sport and it’s facing an existential crisis because fans have an awareness of what matters and it’s not a one-day series with nothing at stake shoehorned into a packed calendar.
Series like that and New Zealand’s with India come perilously close to being labelled “content” rather than “contest”.
Here, the highs of 2015-2021 already feel like they’re from a different era. NZC, which has taken great pride in the ability of its high-performance system to produce ultra-competitive Black Caps sides across three formats, now has to be facing questions about how it got its 2022-23 planning so wrong.
To lose one centrally contracted player to franchise T20 cricket could be considered careless, to lose four is something else and points to a complacency that can’t be explained away by the “shifting sands of franchise cricket” and the “need to be flexible”.
How did the lines of communication falter so badly that Trent Boult, Colin de Grandhomme and Renegade Martin Guptill have handed back contracts, while James Neesham, who initially missed out, refused a vacant spot because of prior commitments?
Not all of this is on NZC, particularly in the case of CdG who went off the reservation, but this was a badly bungled round of contracting.
On cue, Kane Williamson added: “Absolutely, [Guptill] will be missed, but like I say he’s not retired. So there’s a lot to keep working through over the next period to get a real feel for how the picture looks.”
This messaging would likely have come from the top, but NZC can’t keep falling back on this. They know how the picture looks - it’s a hot mess of franchise league graffiti and bilateral gloop - but they have to decide whether they’re powerless within this “picture” or want to grab the brush.
Franchise cricket is not going away. IPL owners are now effectively cricket’s oligarchs, buying cricket across the globe. It was fine when the IPL was a single window. NZC’s “flexibility” was not just admirable but necessary. There is no longer just the one window to worry about and that flexibility has the potential to seriously dent the country’s flagship team and alienate its supporters.
The fortunes of the Black Caps and of cricket in this country in general, has rarely felt so precarious.
Despite all that, today is a momentous one. Assuming the abysmal weather that has ruined November doesn’t interrupt again, Kane Williamson will bat in an ODI match in the country’s largest city for the first time in 2092 days, or about three million minutes, depending on your preferred unit of time.
In that period, Williamson has strapped his favourite Gray-Nicolls one-day pads on in Birmingham, Cardiff, Mumbai, Pune, Kanpur, Whangarei, Wellington, Nelson, Dunedin, Hamilton, Christchurch, Abu Dhabi, Mt Maunganui, Napier, London, Taunton, Manchester, Chester-le-Street, Sydney, Bridgetown and freakin’ Cairns of all places.
As a self-confessed tragic who slavishly watches even the most meaningless of cricket content, I just wish he was playing on an actual cricket ground.
NZ v India, 1st ODI, Auckland, today 2.30pm, Spark Sport
NZ v India, 2nd ODI, Hamilton, Sunday 2.30pm, Spark Sport
The Week That Was
I had a bit of harmless fun for The Spinoff, ranking every test involving the All Blacks and Black Ferns this year. The Black Ferns dominated either end of the spectrum, while the All Blacks held the middle ground. During the course of this scientific exercise, I realised just how many bizarre tests the All Blacks have been involved in across the course of the year.
If you’re only interested in the “highlights” package, here’s a select few to ponder.
25. Black Ferns 95-12 Japan (Eden Park, September 24)
With six weeks between the second Laurie O’Reilly test and the World Cup, the Black Ferns needed this “test” for a tune up. Nobody else did.
22. All Blacks 53-3 Argentina (Waikato Stadium, September 3)
When All Black apathy was at an all-time high. Ian Foster’s retention had been announced at a show-trial press conference and his team then promptly lost the next test to this opponent. The Pumas subsequently spent the next week drinking at the Outback Tavern and New Zealand spent it stewing. The ABs responded with a big win but, frankly, no one outside of Foster and Sam Cane cared.
18. All Blacks 12-23 Ireland (Forsyth Barr Stadium, July 9)
This first Irish win on New Zealand soil might have been a riotous occasion for those watching in green, but this was an inexcusably poor game of rugby under the Dunedin roof, marked only by Angus Ta’avao being red carded for face-butting Garry Ringrose and the All Blacks ballsing up their replacements so Ardie Savea couldn’t return. Also for Ireland’s Peter O’Mahony calling Cane a “shit Richie McCaw”, which was lauded in some quarters as being on a par with the wit and wisdom of Oscar Wilde, but is actually kind of just a shit thing to say to a fellow professional.
13. Wales 23-55 All Blacks (Principality Stadium, November 6)
Wayne Pivac’s Wales were absolutely ofnadwy and at times even anghymwys, but Ardie Savea’s dummy!
12. Black Ferns 23-10 Australia (Tauranga Domain, June 6)
While the rest of the Pacific Four Series was relegated to the outskirts of these rankings, this test, on the final Queen’s Birthday Monday of the foreseeable future, carried more weight because it was the first test with Smith in charge and Ted being paid to look his most “Ted”. It wasn’t excellent, but it was a come-from-behind win and it was most definitely the start of something.
6. England 25-25 All Blacks (Twickenham, November 20)
Patriots might disagree, but blowing a 19-point lead against a side that had shown nothing – nothing! – for 70 minutes was the perfect coda for this All Black season. Oh, and that try to Rieko Ioane was something else.
4. South Africa 23-35 All Blacks (Ellis Park, August 14)
A gloriously redemptive All Blacks performance when it was least expected, which featured a nose-thumbing try to beleaguered captain Cane and a sanguine Foster telling Jeff Wilson he still didn’t know whether he would be coach by the end of the following week but he was going to enjoy this win. It was the catalyst for the All Blacks winning the Rugby Championship but it was in other respects a false dawn.
1. Black Ferns 34-31 England (Eden Park, November 12)
To the surprise of nobody, that complete mindfuck of a World Cup final comes out on top. It had everything from English set-piece and mauling precision, to a red card, to Ruahei Demant’s imagination, to Stacey Fluhler’s broken ankle, to the Hand of God and it all happened in a cauldron of extreme jeopardy in front of a crowd as engaged as any seen in a rugby match here since at least 2011 and probably forever. The biggest occasion of the year was also the best match – a rare and cherished combination.
Fight! High Performance Sport NZ v The Athletes… again. Just one question: what on earth is a “Top name Olympian”?
[HPSNZ’s] position is that athletes are not their employees, and therefore it cannot enter into employment negotiations. The union is now seeking a determination from the [Employment Relations] Authority that contracted athletes are effectively employees of High Performance Sport NZ, setting up a fascinating test case that will likely be closely watched… by other athlete representative groups in New Zealand [and] overseas bodies.
This is incredible and horrible and Matt Williams’ response is, well… it’s pretty obvious how I’d feel about it but you can make up your own mind. I’d just like to ask him this: if he saw smoke starting to billow in his house while his kids played upstairs, would he wait for firefighters to arrive to give him advice, or would he judge what was in front of his eyes and do something about it?
The Weekend That Will Be
Just your occasional reminder that this isn’t an exhaustive list of what’s on, but what I will be attempting to watch.
There is no getting around the fact that I desperately need this nearly sport-free weekend, so apart from the above mentioned cricket, I’m not focused on much outside the World Cup, and that’s largely because the 17-year-old boy of the house has commandeered the TV lounge for the next month.
He cares very little for the plight of outspoken Iranian footballers, but does worry about Neymar’s ankle.
Wales v Iran, Al Rayyan, tonight 11pm; England v USA, Al Khor, tomorrow 8am; France v Denmark, Doha, Sunday 5am; Argentina v Mexico, Lusail, Sunday 8am, all Sky Sport
There is rugby on this weekend, with the woeful Welsh and only slightly less woeful Wallabies meeting in Cardiff. Avoid. There is some interest in the replay of the 2019 World Cup final at Twickenham, but despite all the Rassie Erasmus hype and hoopla, I have a feeling South Africa and England (Sunday 6.30am, Sky Sport 1) will put on a terrible show.
The cynic in me went off triathlon when it became a glorified 10km road race after a pointless warm-up on a flat bike course, but Hayden Wilde has reignited my interest to the point that if I can win the arm wrestle for the remote, I might tune in (Saturday 11.50pm, Sky Sport 2) to Yas Island for the championship finale that could see him crowned world champion.
The Black Caps hmmmm….definitely a fading outfit. Guptill was definitely heading down the other side but it’s still hard not to feel sorry for him when other guys have been protected species. We had a bunch of guys establish themselves about the same time - Guptill, KW, Boult, Southee and I think it’s fair to say subsequent players have failed to establish themselves in the same way. Hence we’re left with a group of fading stars and ordinary players. Guys like Santner & Sodhi are maddening - have played so many games for NZ but have failed to stamp their mark on the team. We’ve also mismanaged some potentially very good players - Will Young springs to mind. Time for us to realise we’re not that good and reorganise the team instead of pretending all is ok in the world
Love your test rankings but I'd swap one and two. Black Ferns vs. France and England were undoubtedly the two best tests of the year - indeed, two of the best tests of any year - but I have to bump the France semi-final just a teeny bit higher due to not having an early red card.
I'm not one of the "red cards ruin games!" brigade, by any means, but they do have SOME effect on the quality of the contest, and I can't quite say Black Ferns vs. England was the best match of the year as a result.