Paul Ford
The Vincent punishment
What incentive do other players have of confessing their involvement in fixing if a lifetime ban is all that they can expect?
Paul Ford
13-Jul-2014
Last Wednesday I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. The catalyst was a story on the TV current affairs show 3rd Degree with a tousle-haired Lou Vincent as the main protagonist.
Vincent was parked up in his lounge, at the crease with Paula Penfold asking the questions. It was 40 minutes of compulsive viewing, but frequently frustrating and infuriating. "Life as a corrupt cricketer is complicated... " intoned Penfold in one voiceover. Oh, come on, cry us a river.
Vincent portrayed himself as a pathetic, naïve soul being led into the den of corruption by a person he looked up to and admired, but could not name. He spoke of hero worship and blind faith and bat bullying. As a cricketer and as a person, he had a reputation to protect, and he let himself down.
Full postMcCullum's triumph and Vincent's shame
For New Zealand's cricketers - and cricket fans - it seems the highs are destined to never last long
Paul Ford
02-Jul-2014
I was a bit late for work on Tuesday morning.
My feet were dawdling down Kent Terrace, but all my care and attention was in Bridgetown, Barbados as the New Zealand bowlers ultimately brought the West Indies batsmen to their knees. It was time to chalk up a magnificent and controversy-free series victory. Pass the chalk.
I doff my white towelling hat to Mark Craig in particular. He should be re-nicknamed "Plucky" rather than "Pudgy" after his extraordinary rise to the top echelon of Kiwi cricket. It was only a few months ago that he was the last-minute ring-in after Jeetan Patel chose England's green and pleasant counties over the Test venues of the Caribbean. You have to be in to win.
Full postI feel sad for cricket
The integrity of the game is taking a massive, but necessary, hit with the Lou Vincent revelations
Paul Ford
19-May-2014
As Socrates the philosopher (not the penalty-taker) said about 2500 years ago: "He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have."
I'm no philosopher, but I know corruption really is a bitch, especially when New Zealand cricketers are tangled up in it. Conceding to the corrupt and the corrupting is the slipperiest of slopes and it breaks my heart that a bloke like Lou Vincent appears to have lost his way so appallingly. For anyone who loves cricket, an inauthentic contest eviscerates the integrity of the game, and it cuts deep.
Even the most cycloptic observer with a strong belief in a presumption of innocence would concede that the raft of leaked allegations, testimony and confessions - complemented by mind-bogglingly accurate details - does not bode well for the protagonists here. There's a lot of smoke, and the fire is an inferno.
Full postTrusting a man with two first names
New Zealand's selectors have taken a punt on 27-year-old offspinner Mark Craig, highlighting the anaemic state of spin bowling in the land
Paul Ford
23-Apr-2014
In Will Farrell's didactic film Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby we learn that you should never trust a man with two first names - but that's exactly what New Zealand cricket fans are going to have to do next month.
Jeetan "Dave" Patel's strangely pragmatic decision to flag joining the New Zealand team and head to Edgbaston to have catches dropped off his bowling while wheeling in for Warwickshire, opened the door for one of the best Kiwi cricketing bolters of all time in Mark Craig.
Nicknamed "Pudgy", 27-year-old offspinner Craig was named as back-up tweaker to Ish Sodhi in the New Zealand Test team setting sail for the West Indies in May. He made the squad on the back of a sensible haircut and two career highlights against Canterbury: 5 for 56 in January 2014 and 5 for 120 in October 2012.
Full postThe Basin bucket list
Visit the museum, frolic on the grass, and watch the game from a special, er, urinal
Paul Ford
13-Feb-2014
Nothing lifts your working day out of the doldrums than the boss approving a day's annual leave for Friday - of course it's Valentine's Day and even more romantically, the first day of the Test match at the Basin Reserve.
For punters heading along to the game, either for the first time or because it's what they do every year, I have a cheeky little assignment for you to work through on the day: a Basin bucket list if you will.
Enter via the CS Dempster Gate: Meander down Kent/Cambridge Terrace and enjoy the arced signage of the Dempster gate that doubles as the turnstile, before you hit a wall of hi-viz vests searching through your ham sandwiches and stash of pistachio nuts. Remember that Stewie Dempster scored New Zealand's first-ever Test ton back on January 24, 1930 - and landed a Test career average of 66.
Full postKiwi fans, soak in this winning feeling
New Zealand played like a team that cared a lot. This unexpected win is one to savour
Paul Ford
04-Feb-2014
It's been an extraordinary fortnight for the New Zealand cricket team and its dragon-skinned but long-suffering fan base. It was nice to hear the captain, Brendon McCullum, acknowledge the resilience of the team's supporters at the Cake Tin on Friday night as he was interviewed in front of a plastic splashback wallpapered in logos.
On Saturday I left the treacly voices of the Alternative Commentary Collective , preposterously intrusive music, and urine-yellow seats of Westpac Stadium behind to pop through the gate at the end of my neglected garden and absorb some low-level club cricket viewing at Ben Burn Park.
There are no seats and the only noise is from the rasping cicadas and distant lawnmowers. Clouds meander past overhead, brushing by like a pod of albino whales in the sky, their shadows racing over the club cricketers and the park's dry grass.
I watched as a bowler called Rupert scooted in off about five paces, with a style that was not in any textbook ever written. He bowled with essentially no front arm - choosing to forget the old coach's instruction of pulling the chain before unleashing the windmill of the arm with the ball in hand.
Full postCricket commentary for those without sensible trousers
A new venture in New Zealand aims to put talk of Linda Hamilton, parmesan and cocktail hour alongside cricket chat
Paul Ford
24-Jan-2014
On Wednesday, in my old hometown of Hamilton, I donned an off-white suit and sat in a sweating, leaking, decrepit, decal-covered caravan parked up with the rear window peering out over the boundary of the second ODI between New Zealand and India. I was part of a new cricket commentary initiative and it was bloody good fun. And at times it was pants-wettingly funny.
I was surrounded by some of New Zealand's most entertaining and excellent blokes, including cult heroes and infamists with sensible names like Lee, Jeremy, Michael, Jason, Matthew, Scott, Leigh and Benjamin. We'd all been roped into helping out with laissez-faire vocal nonsense on a new initiative called The Alternative Commentary Collective.
Together this ivory-suited platoon soaked up a rain-affected thriller in which India scored more runs than New Zealand and yet conspired with Messrs Duckworth and Lewis to lose by 15 runs.
Full postBlood and orange
Expect spectators to arrive at New Zealand grounds prepared to put their bodies on the line for a six-figure sum
Paul Ford
05-Jan-2014
There's a wonderful sideshow under way beyond the boundary at all of New Zealand's ODIs this summer. It involves orange t-shirts and sticky fingers.
The guts of the promotion is that you buy a branded t-shirt for 30 bucks and get it along to a game. Once you get a lanyard at the gate confirming you're a competition starter, the shirt effectively becomes your entry to this particular cricketing lottery.
Then, if you manage to snaffle a "clean" one-handed catch off a six during the ODI being played in front of your eyes, you get a cool NZ$100,000 (US$82,000). There's a bounty on offer at each of New Zealand's ODIs this summer: 12 chances and $1.2 million in the kitty.
Full postWhere the hell is Henry?
They love Gayle down in New Zealand, but they've got to see precisely nothing of him this season
Paul Ford
24-Dec-2013
Excellent. New Zealand have successfully pummelled West Indies in a Test series, and were unlucky to only win 2-0 instead of 3-0. That is a sentence rarely written without telling porkies.
Of course, you can only beat whoever and whatever is put in front of you, and Brendon McCullum's side has done that solidly for three weeks. But West Indies really were dreadful.
That stereotypical Caribbean lackadaisicalness looked to have crossed over into a dangerous realm that was not so much nonchalant as just not caring at all. As the West Indies lower order slogged and limped its way to an innings defeat at the Basin, you could see the bench players laughing away at the procession of wickets. That sort of carry-on is pretty disappointing from any Test team, and it's disrespectful to the game and the punters shelling out NZ$43 for the privilege of watching.
Full postA quintet of screamers
Where does Trent Boult's stunning catch stack up in the annals of ripper catches by New Zealanders?
Paul Ford
17-Dec-2013
On Friday afternoon, Denesh "Shotter" Ramdin rocked onto the back foot to an innocuous Corey Anderson delivery and smoked it through point at a thousand kilometres an hour. The New Zealander with the golden arm, Trent Boult, leapt high to his left and snaffled Ramdin's cut shot like a lizard tongue reining in an insect for dinner.
My mate Jimmy had gone to get some cash and returned with a fistful of dollars. I assumed he'd nailed the optimal view on his pilgrimage to deep backward point. "Oh man, did you see that screamer snare by Boult?" I asked. "No," he replied. "I was perfectly positioned but facing the money machine." He missed the catch by 180 degrees.
That's the thing about cricket - you can sit there all day and the most exciting thing might happen when you're checking a text message, stuck in the Basin's war-era toilets, choosing between Tui or Tui Blond at the beer tent, or distracted by a man in a tie daring to walking past. I like to think that if you attend as much cricket as is humanly and financially possible, you ensure that you see more great moments than you miss.
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