Paul Ford
University Oval utopia
A diverted flight, world-famous pineapple bread, and the hellephant in the room. We belatedly present the sights and sounds from Dunedin
Paul Ford
10-Dec-2013
A few mates and I just got back from cricketing heaven and hell on the banks of Logan Park in Dunedin.
It's a magnificent spot for Test cricket, small but perfectly formed, and furnished with the fundamental requirement for Test cricket in Aotearoa: an almost all-encompassing grass embankment. (I often hear people describe the Oval as "intimate", but I don't know why, as it certainly didn't seem familiar, private or personal.)
Nestled between rows of tall trees, beneath a quarry and in the shadow of the fantastic Forsyth Barr Stadium: I can understand why Ross Dykes raves about this place. Not that it's an easy spot to get to.
Full postTen things you need to know about Otago Volts
It's not all BB Mac, you know. They also have a doppelganger, a mattress, a chameleon, and a bearded trainer
Paul Ford
25-Sep-2013
Nobody calls them Otago Volts
It's just Otago - even ESPNcricinfo has acknowledged this in the tournament schedule. The electrically charged moniker is just a whiz-bang name that emerged when the marketing people got their hands on the NZ domestic one-day competition and zhuzhed it up back in the early noughties, when the State Shield emerged from the ashes of the Shell Cup. For the record, neither competition name was as good as the domestic competition's original name: The New Zealand Motor Corporation Knock-Out.
It's just Otago - even ESPNcricinfo has acknowledged this in the tournament schedule. The electrically charged moniker is just a whiz-bang name that emerged when the marketing people got their hands on the NZ domestic one-day competition and zhuzhed it up back in the early noughties, when the State Shield emerged from the ashes of the Shell Cup. For the record, neither competition name was as good as the domestic competition's original name: The New Zealand Motor Corporation Knock-Out.
They have a doppelganger in their midst
Check out Sam Wells doing his Daniel Vettori impression last week here. Magnificent! Perhaps this is the beginning of an alternate career, a one-man Vettori tribute show. He just needs to undergo a metamorphosis and transform his right-arm seam into left-arm spin and ugly up his batting.
Check out Sam Wells doing his Daniel Vettori impression last week here. Magnificent! Perhaps this is the beginning of an alternate career, a one-man Vettori tribute show. He just needs to undergo a metamorphosis and transform his right-arm seam into left-arm spin and ugly up his batting.
Otago supporters hate Kolkata Knight Riders
Every Otago supporter was stoked when KKR tanked in the 2013 edition of the Indian Premier League and failed to qualify for the Champions League. Why? Because it meant the Otago talisman, Brendon McCullum, could don the Otago colours. Any team with BB McCullum in it is a much more frightening proposition - not only for his brutal batting and aggressive captaincy but also for the halo effect on his team-mates.
Full postEvery Otago supporter was stoked when KKR tanked in the 2013 edition of the Indian Premier League and failed to qualify for the Champions League. Why? Because it meant the Otago talisman, Brendon McCullum, could don the Otago colours. Any team with BB McCullum in it is a much more frightening proposition - not only for his brutal batting and aggressive captaincy but also for the halo effect on his team-mates.
Boardroom games
In a slow cricket news week in New Zealand, Martin Snedden and Geoff Allott's possible return to administrative roles is the talk of the town
Paul Ford
12-Sep-2013
I know Olonga is a complete cricketing legend as the first black player to don the Zimbabwe strip, and for his brave political stands. Even complete cricket legends have grumpy days, though.
One was at the Basin Reserve in the ill-fated Boxing Day Test match in 2000. It was a day when as an African fast bowler you would certainly wish you weren't in Wellington. After Olonga brought up his century of runs conceded - mostly to stock car driver Nathan Astle and diabetic Craig McMillan - we politely clapped him back to third man. We'd driven down from Hamilton and listened to the batting carnage the previous day as we chugged around Lake Taupo and through the Manawatu Plains down to the capital.
Full postBoots returns
Bruce Edgar once battled the might of the world's fastest bowlers. Now he has to negotiate the challenges of national selection
Paul Ford
24-Aug-2013
We love Bruce "Boots" Edgar, the former New Zealand batsman who is opening his innings in the murky, swirling politics of the Kiwi cricketing milieu as general manager of national selection in a few weeks.
Edgar has a lot to answer for as the catalyst for the entire Beige Brigade movement, unbeknownst to him of course. His uniform was the one snapped up by Daniel Vettori and Chris Cairns back in the late 1990s at a fundraising dinner in the UK.
The glorious brown-and-tan slacks and powerfully-collared shirt eventually found their way to the hairy back of Beige Brigade co-founder Mike Lane, who was then in the midst of a lager-fuelled tertiary education at the University of Canterbury.
Full postNew Zealand's turf wars
Announcements about the hosting of the World Cup in New Zealand have sparked minor furores
Paul Ford
14-Aug-2013
There's a turf war under way in New Zealand on three fronts at the moment.
Battle one is on the southern front, in Christchurch. This one's all about whether the city's home of gun crime, Hagley Oval, should be redeveloped into an international cricket venue in time to host the 2015 World Cup opener.
There's a lot of debate raging about whether a pocket of the ginormous 164-hectare public park should be used for cricket, despite the fact it's already home to an existing Oval for club and first-class games.
Full postThe World Cup and the Young Guns
At the launch event for the 2015 tournament, the mind goes back to the glorious days of 1992
Paul Ford
30-Jul-2013
We were stoked when the crew at the World Cup 2015 asked if we were keen to get along to their ritzy launch event in a darkened bar on the Wellington waterfront, surrounded by a plethora of outside broadcast vans that were airing live on national and international television.
It was excellent to see so many turned up with their embossed invites, given Wellington's burgeoning reputation as the place that puts the shake in Shaky Isles (and the launch venue being on potentially wobbly reclaimed land at the edge of Wellington Harbour).
We weren't stoked to be there because we are intoxicated by the thought of international cricketing stardom, or because we're moths to the celebrity flame of famous cricketing sons. No, we just liked the idea of having a couple of beers and doing our bit to endorse what we reckon will be a ripper international event.
Full postIn the dead of the antipodean night
Following the Ashes in New Zealand can be a lonely pastime - but one that brings ideas for the improvement of the game to mind
Paul Ford
17-Jul-2013
Watching the Ashes as a neutral in the inhospitable dead of the antipodean night is a lonely, pulsating, and highly addictive pastime.
In New Zealand, our best chance of direct involvement was extinguished last month when Billy Bowden was axed from the elite panel by the ICC and sent away to play golf with Asad Rauf. Billy was the most significant Kiwi contributor to cricket's greatest rivalry since Andy Caddick from Papanui High School took 5 for 50 at Edgbaston in 1997.
As Billy walked awkwardly off the Anglo-Australian stage, he took with him our Ashes memories as an honest but crooked-fingered and eccentric umpire who sawed off Michael Kasprowicz for gloving one from Steve Harmison back in 2005. Replays - and they were endless - showed the Queensland rocker's paw was not on the bat handle when the leather slid by. Ricky Ponting went septic, and Billy has frequently nominated it as his most memorable decision.
Full postTwo Chris Martin stories
A dropped catch and a nervous innings - they don't portray him in a good light, yet somehow they do
Paul Ford
07-Jul-2013
"Cricket was a once-a-week thing that I did hungover on a Saturday for St Albans."
-- Chris Martin, North & South, March 2012
-- Chris Martin, North & South, March 2012
As I was chomping on Wednesday's dinner of edamame beans and duck risotto, I spotted my Beige Brigade cohort Mike Lane under-dressed on 3 News, telling Huw Beynon that Chris Martin would be missed, and that he loved him for being the bloke who batted No. 11 in a team of No. 11s.
It was a good call - he is the only Test cricketer I've ever come across who batted last man Jack at every level of cricket that he played: international, domestic and for his club. Probably at backyard level too.
Full postA complicated colossus of Kiwi cricket
Martin Crowe comes across as intense and angry in his latest book, Raw, but appears laidback when you meet him
Paul Ford
23-Jun-2013
"I lived my life in a private struggle in my mind."
--Martin Crowe, June 2013
--Martin Crowe, June 2013
I went to a cricket gig this week - it was a Carillon Club fundraiser in the Wellington CBD and involved some beers, some hors d'oeuvres, and some listening to Martin Crowe.
I loved Martin Crowe as a kid. I had his statistics as my EFTPOS card pin number for years. I have a framed print of Dick Frizzell's wonderful portrait of him batting at Lord's in my man cave. I love his passion for the game, and I regard him as a fantastic innovator and one of the sport's pre-eminent thinkers. We also agree that the New Zealand cricket team should be called the New Zealand cricket team - I liked it when he wrote: "Calling our national cricket team the Black Caps is plain awful."
Full postAn anti-religious passion
The obsession with the game that India and Pakistan fans have is one to envy
Paul Ford
16-Jun-2013
As much as I'd like to be donning my raincoat and traipsing around the ménage à trois of Champions Trophy venues, I'm not. Instead I'm wearing my beige pyjamas, hydrating with a mix of coffee, cold lager and energy drinks, and soaking up a smorgasbord of late-night cricket viewing as the eight threads of this competition unravel.
I have also seen some live cricket this week, albeit in an improbable location among improbable conditions. Actually, there was a raincoat involved.
On Saturday afternoon, having taken a season out of my burgeoning social football career, I found myself at Kelburn Park. It's one of Wellington's prettiest cricket spots - in summer - with a vista that includes the CBD, the harbour and uninhabited hills in the distance.
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