Monday Mash-up: A pitched battle
Sam goes to the well for Nicholls; Shohei gets paid and we have a book prize winner.
“It is probably the worst wicket I’ve come across in my career,” Tim Southee said after his team clung on to beat Bangladesh and even the series. “The balance between bat and ball was heavily favoured into the bowler’s hands. I think for the match to be over in 170 overs reflects that.”
I’m glad Southee ditched the diplomacy and told it like it was. Doing it from the winner’s rostrum gave it more weight, too. If New Zealand had fallen short rather than picking up an admirable four-wicket win over Bangladesh in Mirpur, a valid gripe would have instead been labelled sour grapes.
When you go to Asia you expect dry, turning pitches that break up as the match goes on. Nobody should expect them to be broken beyond repair from ball one.
At a time when bilateral cricket in general is struggling to win eyeballs and has collapsed in value, the last thing we need to see is really bad cricket.
That’s what we got at the Sher-e-Bangla Stadium for most of the paltry 178.1 overs.
A game in the Big Bash was abandoned last night after the officials, with prompting from the batting team, decided the Geelong wicket was unsafe for further play. Watching Devon Conway try to negotiate Shoriful Islam - a handy but, in normal circumstances, hardly life-threatening seamer - must have put similar thoughts into the minds of umpires Paul Reiffel and Rod Tucker, and match referee David Boon.
Conway pushed forward to a good length ball that whizzed past his nose. He was creasebound to a couple that cut him in half as they jagged back in. He wafted at a ball that started with a little width but ended with the keeper taking it in front of first slip, and was eventually trapped playing back to one that skidded through low.
It wasn’t batting, it was a turkey shoot.
There is often criticism that modern cricket favours batters too much. This might be true in the white-ball formats but it certainly isn’t in tests, as this Cricinfo feature from two years ago demonstrates. While bats are bigger and grounds are smaller, the combined effects of DRS and (it was very hard to win front-foot LBW appeals before ball-tracking technology) and home boards instructing curators to prepare wickets to suit their bowlers have made increasingly difficult for batters.
This was an example of the latter in its most blatant form, which is why I got a small kick out of the successful chase and the fact it was two ‘fringey’ players that got New Zealand home.
Glenn Phillips had a brilliant tour, playing an un-Gary Stead-like agent-of-chaos role.
He succeeded by doing what others locked into more traditional methods couldn’t: he played back whenever possible, got legside of the ball and backed his lightning-fast hands to adjust to the ball no matter what tricks it played off the surface. When playing off the front foot he hit hard.
Mitchell Santner, an inspired selection (credit where it is due), watched his batting mate and thought, “I can do that.” One boundary he slid behind point off an arm ball arrowing in at the top of off was a rare moment of beauty in an ugly test.
In matches like that, you take what you can get.
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What in the name of Disraeli was selection manager Sam Wells thinking with his defence of under-fire Henry Nicholls in the weekend? By all means stick up for your player, but in this case it would have been better to do it in Gavin Larsen mode by using meaningless platitudes dressed up as wisdom.
Instead he used a curious defence that involved blaming Nicholls’ contemporaries for being too good while invoking ghosts of the past.
“Henry is up there with some of our greats of the game in terms of run scoring,” Wells said. “He seems to attract this criticism... he’s playing with some of the greats of the modern era for New Zealand, when you look at some of the other guy’s averages…
“If you looked at past teams, and they had a batsman with Henry Nicholls’ record, he would be one of our best players…
“His form has been up and down a little bit, but obviously he scored a double-hundred a couple of tests ago. He’s got nine test centuries, which is as many as Stephen Fleming scored in his 111 tests.”
If the implication is that Fleming1 didn’t come under similar scrutiny then he has a very short memory. The tall left-hander’s anaemic 50s to 100s conversion rate was a running joke that even Fleming was in on by the end of his career and, if you’re going to compare the two, you need to acknowledge that the latter took the reins of his country at an absurdly young age and when cricket had rarely been at such a low ebb. In other words, batting was just a part of his equation.
Also, Wells says that Nicholls’ excellence is partly obscured by the feats of his teammates without acknowledging the armchair ride he has enjoyed batting at No5 behind the likes of Tom Latham, Kane Williamson, Ross Taylor and latterly Devon Conway, all of whom carry 40+ averages.
You can use lies and statistics to damn or deify Nicholls depending on whether you like him as a player or not. He has been a very, very good player at times. At others, not so much. Undeniably, he is an effective accumulator of three-figure scores, which is not the only benchmark for a test batter, but is certainly an important one. Indisputably, he has endured longer fallow periods than any modern New Zealand batter has been afforded before. That is where the frustration about what some see as his ‘protected status’ comes in.
You can compare him to the past or present to your heart’s content but as a selector you have one job - to pick the best team. The question Wells was either not asked or didn’t address was this: Is Nicholls, who has been out of form for the best part of two years, keeping a potentially better player out of the side?
That is the only thing that Wells has to decide - not whether his conversion rate is superior to a guy who retired nearly a decade-and-a-half ago.
As it was, Nicholls’ ongoing place in the test side ahead of the visits of South Africa and Australia are not the only posers.
Will Ajaz Patel’s latest five-wicket haul be enough to convince he is worthy of a crack in home conditions?
(Unlikely)
Has Phillips leapfrogged Michael Bracewell in the pecking order?
(More likely)
And what of Santner?
(Good question)
Could Ish Sodhi have played his final test?
(Not necessarily, but route back is tricky)
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There was plenty of great email feedback and comments on Friday’s story about bilateral cricket, including from a VIP! I will respond to your comments and pick out some points to consider following this week’s BYC podcast.
They showed Shohei Ohtani the money!
Baseball unicorn, two-way player Ohtani, just received a US$700 million contract from the Los Angeles Dodgers that has blown any previous player deals out of the water. Or, as The Ringer put it in the headline: Shohei Ohtani’s $700 Million Dodgers Contract Is Unlike Anything in MLB History.
In the past several years, Ohtani has reshaped our conception of what’s possible in baseball. He’s rewritten the record book and even the rule book. Now he’s rewriting the chequebook by signing the richest contract ever inked by an athlete, in unadjusted dollars. In Ohtani’s rookie season, he made the league minimum; in his seventh season, he’ll make a new maximum. His deal (which may still be contingent on a sure-to-be-rigorous physical) nearly doubles the $360 million record for a free agent, set by Aaron Judge last December. Split Ohtani’s new salary in two, and you could pay two Hall of Famers.
One incredible factor in the 10-year deal: Ohtani won’t be able to pitch at all in 2024 and multiple elbow issues, including surgery, it is reasonable to speculate that he might never hit the same heights as a pitcher he did with the now-spurned crosstown Los Angeles Angels.
The best stat I saw: the Dodgers are paying him $700m for 10 years; John Henry bought the Boston Red Sox, the third-most valuable franchise in baseball, for $660m in 2002.
It was a good weekend for Magic Johnson. The co-owner of the Dodgers also watched on as a team he used to play for - one that was once based in Minnesota, a state that has more than 11,000 lakes - won the NBA’s inaugural in-season tournament.
A team that my Celtics fandom refuses to allow me to fully acknowledge.
Lydia Ko is back in the winner’s circle, with a little help from her friend, winning the inaugural Grant Thornton Invitational in Florida with playing partner Jason Day.
The 26-year-old went into 2023 the No 1 women’s golfer in the world, after a spectacular 2022 season ensured she went into this year with many picking her to secure Hall of Fame eligibility.
However, she failed to secure the final two points required to do so, slipping to 11th in the world after conjuring just two top-10 LPGA Tour finishes on the year and finishing 90th on the money list.
Ko and former world No 1 Day were one of 16 teams competing for a total purse of US$4 million (NZ$6.53m).
BOOKS PRIZE WINNER
A massive thank you to everybody who wrote in to enter the prize for two books. Almost immediately I regretted the competition format, because there were multiple deserving entries.
There was one story in particular, however, that hit home. It’s a very personal story that would be wrong to share here, but it involved universal themes of mateship and the importance of checking in with those who are doing it tough.
Hamish’s letter for his mate was a timely read, but thanks again to everybody who took the effort to write in.
A far more logical career comparison for Nicholls would be Craig McMillan, another player who batted in the middle order, who had extended lean patches and who sometimes faced disproportionate criticism.
I’m going to come back with more comments later, but the Sam Wells defence of Nicholls is laughable. Nicholls has largely cruised in behind our greatest 3 / 4 combination in history, used modern bats and padded his average with a steady diet of matches against the worst West Indian and Sri Lankan teams in living memory. He is *not even in the conversation* with a player of Stephen Fleming’s quality, and even with all the advantages listed above averages 3 runs less. He’s also nowhere near as good as say a Jeremy Coney, who has the same average but only scored 3 test hundreds. To me he’s about as good in the general wash up as a Mark Greatbatch or Ken Rutherford, both of whom had their moments but ultimately weren’t really missed when jettisoned - and I don’t think Nicholls will be either when the selectors finally get round to eating some humble pie.
I was frustrated by several of the comments on a Stuff article that essentially said "they both had to bat on it". Yes, but if you have little hope of predicting how much any given delivery will turn and bounce, then it's reduced to a game of luck more than skill. If that's the case, I may as well go and play snakes and ladders with my youngest daughter. To those who say "well Phillips managed to bat on it" - he also got dropped on one. I did appreciate the fact that Stuff ran an article with six of NZ's worst pitches, just to prove we're not immune. That whole 2002/03 series against India was a shocker