Under the Fort Pts IV/ V
PLUS: Ko's groove continues, Lawson's ascent imminent and Razor's tiresome Richie obsession.
Sri Lanka 305 and 309 (Karunaratne 83, Chandimal 61, Mathews 50; Patel 6-90, O’Rourke 3-49); NZ 340 and 211 (Ravindra 92; Ramesh Mendis 3-83, Jayasuriya 5-68).
Three big things from days four and five of the first test at Galle.
1. A minor masterpiece on an uneven canvas
To steal a line from a popular song, this team is starting to perish like a fading horse, but at least we have 10 years of Rachin Ravindra to look forward to.
Across both innings, Ravindra could have been out five times before he got to 15. On other days he would have, but that’s by the by. Nobody in the New Zealand line-up looked comfortable early bar Kane Williamson, who just happens to be the one of the best players in the world, and to a lesser extent Tom Latham.
Ravindra blossomed with time at the crease. It was a surprise to see him fall for 39 in the first, lunging aimlessly forward to the sort of ball that he had previously rocked back to and used his fast hands to get him out of trouble. That was a good knock, the day-four one was special, even if his faith in the tailenders was misplaced to the point of self-defeating.
It’s pointless to say he deserved a century because if he deserved one he would have got one, but yeah, I was as disappointed for him not reaching three figures as I was for what it meant to the team’s infinitesimal chances of ticking off the 68 runs needed to win on the final day.
On a surface that was uneven, powdery and about as foreign to those who have learned their trade in Wellington as is possible, Ravindra’s skill and fluency was a joy to behold and it was only ended with by a very liberal DRS interpretation of “wickets in line”.
3. The Inevitable Conway Question
From one Wellington southpaw to another...
Show me a professional sports team where every player is in great form at the same time and then tell me it’s not the Harlem Globetrotters.
It just doesn’t happen.
There are few sports, however, where a lack of form is so ruthlessly exposed as cricket and not a single discipline where that exposure is as soul-stripping as opening batter.
There are others in the XI who are some way short of the top of their game, including Mitchell Santner — if you happened to sit through his anaesthetic-free 22-ball root canal on the fourth evening, I too feel your pain — and Tim Southee, but it’s Conway’s tone-setting struggles that are being felt most acutely. While there are bowling options that will be explored on this five-test Asia swing, there is not much to be done at the top of the order.
It was at Karachi in January last year that Conway notched the last of his four test centuries. Since then he has passed 50 just three times in 18 test innings. His average, 57.5 after the Karachi ton, has slipped below 40 for the first time in his career.
The numbers, as concerning as they are, tell only part of the story. More worryingly, he looks a mess at the crease. It’s hard to recall ever seeing a top-order player of such class beaten on the inside edge so often, but he is so closed off he can’t see to meet any ball angling into his body with anything but a one-handed jab.
When bowled in the second innings for four, Conway became the first, and would remain the only, New Zealander to be dismissed by pace.
This leadership group, and the one before them, doesn’t tend to drop veteran batters until they are so mentally shot they require a leather couch more than a net session and a bowling machine, so you would expect Conway to take guard again at the same venue at the end of the week.
The other options are Will Young, a fine player whose average of 22.8 as an opener tells you that is not his position, or a reshuffle of the order.
That’s something New Zealand should, but likely won’t, explore. They’re 0-1 down and need to win. They’re not going to do so by offering more of the same. As doom-laden as this sounds, they probably batted about as well as could be expected in those conditions and still fell short.
Why not try something a little more radical and open with a pinch-hitting right-hander, with Tom Blundell or Glenn Phillips the two most obvious candidates, thereby moving Conway into the middle order and breaking up that run of three right-handers from Daryl Mitchell to Phillips.
To have any chance, New Zealand has to do some damage at the top. They are not going to get anything useful out of the tail in spinning conditions. In the seven tests they’ve played on the subcontinent since winning the WTC (including two on a road in Karachi), numbers 9 through 11 have been dismissed 24 times, 15 of them for 5 or under. They have posted more binary scores than they have hit double figures.
I wasn’t disappointed with how New Zealand went about their batting, even in the run chase. Sure, some of the dismissals, like premeditated misadventures of Williamson and Tom Blundell, looked pretty ugly, but you could at least see the method behind their thinking.
If the pitch for the second test, played at the same venue, is anything like the first, there will be a ball with your name on it — the key will be to maximise the ones that haven’t.
3. A left-arm love story
Okay, so it might be subject to the smallest print run in sports publishing history, but there’s a book to be had in the weird and wonderful world of New Zealand left-arm orthodox spin.
What a cast of characters.
There’s the workhorse: Hedley Howarth (86 wickets in 30 tests).
The whimsical: Stephen Boock (74 in 30).
The pious: Bryan Yuile (34 in 17).
The endomorphic: Tom Burtt (33 in 10).
The nonpareil: Daniel Vettori (362 in 113).
The can-bat-a-bits: Matt Hart (29 in 14), Evan Gray (17 in 10) and Mitchell Santner (54 in 27).
The can-bat-a-lot: Rachin Ravindra (10 in 8).
The domestic servants: David O’Sullivan (18 in 11), Mark Priest (3 in 3) and Bruce Martin (12 in 5).
The trivia questions: Mark Haslam (2 in 4), Eric Dempster (2 in 5), Allen Lissette (3 in 2) and Norman Gallichan (3 in 1).
(There will be others I’ve missed, no doubt, and if you’re nitpicking you could point out the absence of Mark Richardson, Bert Sutcliffe and Mystery Morrison who on the rarest of occasions would roll the left arm over.)
One man who would make a wonderful standalone chapter in this imaginary book is Ajaz Patel, a man who has exactly zero test wickets in New Zealand.
His might be the most curious career of the lot of them. With eight wickets in Galle he has moved to 70 in 17 tests and before this spring swing is out he will almost certainly have passed Boock for third and will be hunting down Howarth for silver.
After a hot-and-cold first innings, Patel bowled beautifully on the fourth morning to at least give New Zealand an outside shot at victory.
A Few Good Stories
Lydia Ko takes a break after the greatest month of her golfing life and comes back even better. To cap off a week that ended with a crushing five-shot victory at the latest stop on the LPGA Tour, she’s not talking about retirement, which was starting to become a fairly tedious part of the Ko narrative, but is instead talking about a career slam.
“I feel like if I set my mind to it, maybe I can do it. It’s always been the goal of mine to do the career grand slam. I thought that would be so out there. I feel like I’ve already been part of this fairytale [couple of months], so why not?”
Why not indeed.
The women play five majors a year and while Ko has the Evian Masters, the Women’s Open and Chevron Championship titles, she’s still missing the US Open and PGA Championship.
You would have got long odds on her doing it at the start of the year. Now, not so much.
This golden age of New Zealand motorsport is set to continue, with an announcement expected any day now that Liam Lawson will replace Australian Daniel Ricciardo at RB Racing.
Granted, a seat at RB will not see Lawson fighting at the pointy end of the grid, but with Kiwis taking up seats in F1, Nascar, IndyCars, Supercars and World Endurance Championship, the proud traditions established by the likes of Bruce McLaren, whose namesake team leads the F1 Constructors Championship, continues.
There was plenty of meat left on the bone from the rugby in the weekend, with Damian McKenzie’s role in the All Blacks’ second-half disorder attracting the most scrutiny.
No matter what way you slice up the blame for the side’s continuing late-game shambles, it is obvious that McKenzie has failed to convince that he is the man to drive the plan. This much is obvious every time the coach pines for a player signed for Toshiba Brave Lupus.
I like the cut of Scott Robertson’s gib and despite the rocky start I believe he will be a tremendously successful All Blacks coach, but his yearning for something he hasn’t got rather than pumping up what he has is unbecoming for a man in his position.
I’m with Stuff’s Paul Cully on this.
All Blacks coach Scott Robertson can’t stop talking about his former Crusaders No 10 Richie Mo’unga.
On Thursday, he revealed that NRL legend Andrew Johns had asked him when Mo’unga was coming back to the All Blacks following days of commentary about whether New Zealand Rugby should dump its selection policy and pick players from overseas…
… There are ways of managing awkward situations and there isn’t much evidence it has been handled well by Robertson: the lack of discretion would have been picked up by the entire playing group.
The equivalent would have been NZ Rugby chief executive Mark Robinson publicly extolling the qualities of Jamie Joseph after the All Blacks’ losses in South Africa.
While honesty is admirable and something we’ve been crying out for in rugby for years, Robertson does not have to do all his thinking out loud.
The other thing that has to be noted about this is that it’s not like Robertson has the begging bowl out for Daniel Carter: Mo’unga, brilliant player that he is, has worn the No 10 jersey in the most recent three All Black World Cup losses.
Having said that, McKenzie needs to be better!
CORRESPONDENCE
I’ve missed a lot of correspondence, both in the comments (keep them coming!) and emails over the past week to 10 days. Apologies for this, I will attempt to acknowledge all of them in the coming days as I chew through a backlog of administration.
I kind of hope we pick the next test team by thinking "What would Sri Lanka hate?": Ben Sears bowling rib ticklers, Will O'Rourke being scary, Matt Henry threatening the stumps, Phillips having a licence to boof some spinners around the park etc.
Conway's run of form makes his casual contract all the more curious. I assume he has been afforded it based on his commitment to become eligible- fair enough I guess.
I just feel like we are going to have to be creative to get anything at all out of these subcontinent forays: set funky fields, toss in a pinch hitter, use the odd golden arm bowler etc.
There is no doubt in my mind that we went into the first Sri Lankan test short of cricket. The Afghanistan fiasco in India being the cause. So I wasn't too upset at the result. The turning point was not establishing a decent first innings lead.
I'm a Conway fan but jeez he does look awful at the crease. Santner to me is not a test match bowler as he doesn't turn it enough and his batting has never come on like it once promised. Southee has been a great servant but he's bowling at 120kph! They won't drop him because he's captain but Sears/Henry would be a better bet.
Ajiz Patel bowled better as the game went on (lack of cricket before) and will be a big factor in the second test.
I remain optimistic but we probably don't want to be chasing a total again.