Day five at Headingley and tour review

As you know, rain failed to deny England on the final day.

England take the series with a 2-0 whitewash, and New Zealand will be wondering where it all went so wrong after scrapping so valiantly in the three Test home series in March.

Credit must go to Alistair Cook and his team, particularly the bowling of Anderson and Broad at Lord’s and Finn and Swann at Headingley. They played to the conditions on both occasions and dominated our batsmen. For the upcoming Ashes series, England, however, may have found their own batting to be as problematic as New Zealand’s outside of Cook, Trott, Root and Bairstow.

It’s hard to hide the disappointment as a New Zealand cricketer or cricket fan after making some real strides since South Africa.

Unlike the South African tour, we fronted up to England with our strongest current team minus Daniel Vettori.

But that’s international cricket. Fortunes change like the weather.

2.

A mystery for me these past post-Test days has been the name, Hiddleston. He’s in the 1937 poem I posted during the Headingley Test.

I hadn’t come across the name before but it’s John Hiddleston. He was a popular and solid bat for Wellington at first class level and once scored a double hundred. He was a North Island and New Zealand rep batsman (before official Test status) after the First World War and during the 1920s.

3.

When I started writing this diary, I told friends I would stop at the end of the first class tour fixtures.

I also mentioned at the outset the fine team of ’49ers led by Walter Hadlee. After their humiliation in the 1946 Basin Test v Australia, Hadlee, Merv Wallace and Co. set about building a team and were determined to put New Zealand cricket back on the map during the 1949 England tour. They succeeded.

For these very reasons, I can’t write off Brendon McCullum and Mike Hesson just yet, nor do I wish to suggest whole scale personnel changes. The team of 2013 has some fine talent still to work with and develop further. We may begin to see this during the ODI series and the Champions Trophy and over the next few years.

Ken Rutherford, another mentioned in the course of this brief tour diary along with Brian Close (who did appear at Headingly with John R Reid), said in his 1995 autobiography that he similarly believed in nurturing all the talent that’s there by showing selection faith in players. Stephen Fleming took a while to get going in the Test arena but was among our most talented batsmen since Martin Crowe’s retirement.

After the 1992 World Cup success, cricket suffered a slump until the late 1990s. There was a rise for a while with Fleming as captain of a good crop of players: Chris Cairns, Dion Nash, Daniel Vettori, Roger Twose, Shane Bond, Nathan Astle, Adam Parore, Craig McMillan, Mark Richardson, Chris Harris etc. England will never forget Astle’s sensational ‘master blaster’ innings of 222. Who’d have predicted Astle’s emergence in the centenary season of 1994?

Rutherford confidently stated during a period of cricket’s declining popularity in 1995 that : ‘…within a decade I believe New Zealand will be among the top four or five nations in the cricket world.’ New Zealand cricket rose again. It may happen too with McCullum’s team. Ken’s son Hamish may well be among our future stars.

The upcoming ODI series, Champions Trophy and Twenty 20 games don’t interest me so much as Test cricket but I will watch them.

This, however, will be my last post on the current England tour.

4.

Perhaps it is fitting to end with an ode to Brendon’s team in review:

MARK PIRIE

To McCullum’s Thirteen*

Thirteen players from New Zealand

Flew off to tour Old England.

Their fortunes have suffered,

But let’s not leave them coffered.

Yes, in review, let me inscribe

Their names with Ferns of the past.

I’ll be this team’s loyal scribe.

Even tho’ cricket’s at half-mast.

*          *          *          *

Fulton, made the runs at home

He didn’t add to his tome;

Still he can rest on laurels

For now, when he arrives home.

Ruds, no not Ken, it’s Hamish now

He secured his spot to end any row.

May he bat on with his willow blade

And make good his run-plough.

Kane did not quite cane the Poms,

But still shows dormant class

As yet untapped. He might surpass

Some records yet, I let him pass.

Rosco again proved his mettle.

He played the best knocks

For that I offer humble tribute.

Rosco with wood guitar clearly rocks.

Guppy has a way to go yet

To be in the bracket of “world class”.

He has the style, can come good yet.

Runs are the key but for me “no pass”.

Brownlie, no Maurice, on this tour.

Mighty was he, but Dean derailed.

Can he lift his play, not become dour;

His bat speed, I lament, failed.

Brendon’s the skipper, as such

He needs to do much more

Than he did this tour and much

Admiration depends on his score.

Watling had the gloves at Lord’s.

He impressed in warm-up matches

But in cricket’s home of Lords

Injury meant he played in snatches.

Southee’s really come good, a hero

At Lord’s, a 10-wicket haul,

His batting’s now handy, no zero

To his name, he’s the heart and the soul.

Boult arrived on the world stage,

5 wickets at Headingly; his name

was made on this tour. With the cage

around the batting, he was not tame.

Doug a cricketer with distinctive tats,

Nice to see him back and playing well.

I won’t bore you with feeble stats.

His name he didn’t disgrace: Bracewell.

Martin was competent without flair;

His batting was missed on this tour;

It’d be hard to see a place and compare

To Vettori if his spin turns sour.

Wagner is still coming on strong.

With his passion, others could learn.

He makes strides and toils on,

While batsmen crash and burn.

*          *          *          *

There you have it, lots of work to do.

McCullum’s building a team and intends

To deliver. And we may yet have a team

To be proud of. Can they tighten the ends?

Poem © Mark Pirie 2013

*Tom Latham and Mark Gillespie also toured but didn’t play in the tests.

Article © Mark Pirie 2013

Ken Rutherford's 317

The second match of New Zealand’s tour with the England Lions looks to be petering out to a draw, due to bad weather. The concern for New Zealand is Tim Southee’s injury. Mark Gillespie, a strike bowler, failed to pick up wickets in the Derbyshire game and Doug Bracewell and Neil Wagner are vying for one of the Test bowling spots. The potential loss of Southee could be a big blow for the Lord’s Test.

A talking point of the New Zealand first innings of 285 was the dominance of the young opener Hamish Rutherford who blunted the Lions’ attack. Rutherford made 126 off 155 balls before being run out. He’s a dasher and a different player to his father, but I still remember the great innings Ken Rutherford played against DB Close’s XI on the 1986 tour, his first tour to England.  (This was also the tour that New Zealand secured a famous Test series victory on English soil.)

Rutherford had a torrid start to his international career. For years his career average suffered from his early Tests where he was easy meat for the West Indies quicks.

Yet, at Scarborough (1 September), playing the last fixture of the 1986 tour, in which he was mainly a batting reserve, Rutherford made a magical 317. Considering the New Zealand first innings score reached 519-7 declared off 94 overs, they made the runs at a cracking pace. Martin Crowe made just 1 and all-rounder Evan Gray contributed 88.

The DB Close XI were no slouches, comprising Javed Miandad, Sadiq Mohammad, CL King and Geoff Boycott in the batting. Bob Taylor the England wicket-keeper played along with bowlers Chris Old, West Indians Roddy Estwick and Franklyn Stephenson (792 first-class career wickets) and Dilip Doshi the Indian spinner.

Doshi went for 142 runs off his 22 overs, almost Twenty 20 pace these days. In one Doshi over, Rutherford hit him for four sixes and looked good for equalling Gary Sobers’ record of six sixes off a first class over before Doshi closed him out with a low, flat delivery to save his blushes. Miandad made an unbeaten 102 to help draw the game for Brian Close’s team in the second innings.

When I looked up the score in Ken Rutherford’s book A Hell of a Way to Make a Living (1995), I found the following out. Rutherford had been out to ‘night spots’ for Willie Watson’s 21st the night before so he was still ‘groggy’. The first hundred came before lunch with Ruds hooking a Stephenson bouncer to square leg on 97 to go to lunch on 101. He slept over the lunch break and then continued the damage, scoring 199 runs between lunch and tea. He continues the story:

Once again I reached a landmark off the last ball before the break. I swatted a ball from Doshi, one bounce into the fence, for four which brought up the triple century. It’s difficult to recall a lot of the detail from the innings. Once I got to around 150 I set my sights on beating my brother Ian’s highest first class score of 222. Once I achieved that I was so far into Wonderland and I just went for everything…The amazing thing about the innings is that it was chanceless. You’d think there would have been the odd miscue but everything seemed to find the middle of the bat and a gap in the field.

  Evan was a tremendous help. He constantly rotated the strike and fed me as much of the bowling as possible. Often he was lost for words as the scoring rocketed along. Our partnership was 319 runs in 154 minutes off 291 balls. Evan scored 51 of them from 118 deliveries. When I returned to the dressing room at tea time the team was as shocked as I. John Wright just paced the room, shaking his head and repeating, “Do you believe that. Do you believe that.” The applause that coincided with my entry into the dressing room woke the captain, Jeremy Coney. He had hardly seen a ball of the session. Knowing I’d been on 101 at lunch he enquired, “Gee, Ruds, you must be on 180 odd.” I replied, “No. Jerry, I’m actually on 300.” He laughed as if waiting for the punch line of a joke until Wright told him to take a look at the scoreboard.

Rutherford was out shortly after tea caught behind by Taylor from Close himself for 317. There were 8 sixes and 45 fours in his total. The feat embedded itself in my mind as a youngster in the ’80s. Ken was one of my favourite cricketers growing up, who probably never really achieved the scores and average he was capable of at Test level. His highest score remained his 107* against England in a home Basin Test in 1988.

Interestingly my copy of Rutherford’s book was picked up at a book fair with no name in the front but inside the previous owner had carefully collected and cut out a series of newspaper clippings and articles on the book, always a bonus to have. The front cover has a barefoot Ken Rutherford, which reminds me (minus the long hair and beads) of the barefoot New Zealand poet James K Baxter.

Rutherford’s 317 off 245 deliveries in 230 minutes, the highest score by a New Zealand player overseas, still stands. In 2000/01, Mark Richardson scored 306 v Zimbabwe A, the next best.

New Zealand would dearly love a similar hard-hitting Test century from Ken’s son Hamish Rutherford on the current England tour. His century against England Lions serves as a warning to the England attack coming off the back of a sterling hundred on Test debut at the University Oval in Dunedin earlier this year.

Article © Mark Pirie 2013

(Sources: A Hell of a Way to Make a Living by Ken Rutherford with Chris Mirams, Hodder Moa Beckett, Auckland, 1995; and the Cricket Archive)





Tim Finn’s NZ cricket song Runs in the Family

One cricket song of note that doesn’t appear in A Tingling Catch is Tim Finn and the Record Partnership’s ‘Runs in the Family’.
Cast your minds back to 1995 and the 100th anniversary of the New Zealand Cricket Council. A one-day tournament was played featuring Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa. Given New Zealand’s run of losses at the time, it was termed ‘the birthday bash from hell’. Penned especially for the anniversary and tournament and maybe to give the Black Caps a boost, Tim Finn’s song climbed to No. 9 on the New Zealand single’s chart. Finn appeared on the Holmes show to promote the single’s release, and all looked bright.

Blair Mulholland, however, later included Tim’s song in his “Worst NZ Songs of All Time” on nzmusic.com in 2004. Here’s the link: http://www.nzmusic.com/node/9029 Blair notes that Finn’s ‘appalling NZ Cricket anthem Runs in the Family … can be number six. It sank even lower than the fortunes of the team in 1995, which was no mean feat really.’ On the second page of comments on Blair's post, one comment by SuperElmo defended the track: ‘Runs In The Family is ok. I remember the video for it.’ I can’t remember the video now myself, but if it had some cricket highlights in it, it was probably okay.

After all the dire predictions and Tim’s efforts, how did the New Zealand team fare in the tournament? The Black Caps surprisingly made the final after beating India and South Africa, largely due to the batting of Mark Greatbatch who had recently returned to the squad, skipper Ken Rutherford and a young Stephen Fleming. Martin Crowe played just one game before picking up an injury. Justin Vaughan, the current CEO of NZ Cricket, was also in the squad. Danny Morrison, Chris Cairns, Chris Pringle, Shane Thomson, Gavin Larsen and Vaughan were the bowling attack.

In the final Shane Warne took 2-21 and Tim May, his spin partner, took 3-19 to reduce the Black Caps to 137-9 at Eden Park. Rutherford made 46 and without Vaughan’s 20 not out, the total could’ve been lower. Captain Mark Taylor, Mark Waugh and David Boon knocked off the runs for Australia in the 32nd over.

Back to Tim Finn’s song, which is worth including on the “Tingling Catch” archive. I made a transcript of it. I admit I’m a fan of some of Finn’s music, particulary the Finn Brother’s album, Everyone is Here (2004), and some Split Enz tracks like ‘Dirty Creature’, ‘I See Red’ and ‘Poor Boy’ as well as Tim’s solo songs like ‘Persuasion’ co-written with English musician Richard Thompson. Tim’s songs for the most part are worth commenting on. The opening stanza of ‘Runs in the Family’ for instance features beach cricket, a Kiwi tradition at holiday baches during summer time:

Runs in the Family

I remember long ago playing

cricket by the sea

My father’s love of grace and skill

still runs in the family

Leather ball and willow bat

the scene of generation’s come

Pay your dues and show respect:

runs in the family

I like Tim’s idea here of a generational tradition in New Zealand, passed down through families, and that’s how some of our best cricketers have been taught. In these opening lines Tim acknowledges his father Richard. Around that time, Joseph Romanos wrote a book called Great New Zealand Cricket Families (1992). In the book Joseph discusses among others: the Hadlee family, the Cairns family, the Crowe family and the Bracewell family - to which you could now add the McCullum family.

Tim’s chorus that follows the opening verse is simple enough, a repeated refrain of ‘Runs in the family’, sung about four times. Overall, I guess it has that anthemic quality, and I can see how SuperElmo thought it was okay to some extent. The single’s not bad in places.

The bit that jarred for me was the attempt to mix in some hip-hop and ragamuffin. Here’s that rap lyric part from the guest performer:

100 years run in the family

watch me now, don’t play Mr Hadlee

Rutherford, Greatbatch, Morrison, Crowe

Coney, Wright, Patel and Jones

broad to the bat is the stylee

wickets and cricket and feeling irie

googly, bouncer, yorker and leg-break

from Eden Park to Kingston, Jamaica

Aotearoa!

What’s odd here is that some of the players named were not in the New Zealand team playing the centenary tournament. Except for ‘Greatbatch, Morrison, Crowe’, the others were no longer in the Black Caps. And the West Indies weren’t at the tournament either, making you wonder why they chose a ragamuffin part for the song. I’m not sure when the song was written in 1994, maybe they thought the Windies were coming and some of these players were still playing, but when it was released, it was those little bits that tended to lessen the impact of the song. Were they using the names of greats like ‘Hadlee’, ‘Coney’ and ‘Wright’ to sell the song? Or were they there to give us a sense of the history of the game. If so, why not Sutcliffe and Reid? The only interesting thing in the rap part was throwing in the word ‘Aotearoa!’ at the end.

I guess that’s why I left it out of A Tingling Catch, though I do like Tim’s opening stanza and the beach cricket idea acknowledging his father very much.

Article © Mark Pirie 2011

Sources: Runs in the Family by Tim Finn and the Record Partnership (cassette single, Epic, 1995); Tim Finn, A Timeline (2009): A Solo, And Sometimes Solitary, Man by Graham Reid, Elsewhere website, 2009; Great New Zealand Cricket Families by Joseph Romanos (Random House, Auckland, 1992); Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia; ESPN Cricinfo Archive; and Worst NZ Songs of All Time by Blair Mulholland, nzmusic.com, 2004.