New Zealand prove size is not everything (22 August 1999)

22 August 1999

New Zealand prove size is not everything

Scyld Berry

England and New Zealand have something in common beyond being smallish islands with a similar genetic make-up. Five years ago they both had poor cricket teams. The difference is New Zealand have reformed their game so that the players, if not successful, now at least make the most of themselves.

In 1994-95, New Zealand toured South Africa under the captaincy of Ken Rutherford as an ill-disciplined bunch. After the tour Stephen Fleming and Dion Nash of the present team were found guilty of a drugs offence, while another player suddenly disappeared after another incident. They had lost their two world-class players, Richard Hadlee and Martin Crowe; cricket's status as a peripheral pastime in the country seemed assured.

Glenn Turner was brought in as coach to inculcate some discipline, only for matters to go from bad to worse. It was like England appointing Geoff Boycott as coach, or Raymond Illingworth, as they actually did at the same time. Turner was an expert, a world No 1 on anything technical. On handling players and man-management he batted at the other end of the order.

New Zealand's tour of the West Indies in 1995 ended in some disarray. Chris Cairns was not performing as New Zealand's one world-class player should have been. He preferred to represent Nottinghamshire, who did care for him and told him so, than his own country. Turner was sacked, but all the problems remained and dissatisfaction multiplied.

As John Graham, New Zealand's tour manager explains, the first reform came at the top. The board had been run by mainly old and entirely well-meaning amateurs with an old-fashioned value system which held that you played Test cricket out of patriotism and love of the game. Money did not come to it, as the board's parlous financial state all too clearly showed.

Compelled by the threat of bankruptcy, if not public ridicule, the old board reformed themselves into a business as New Zealand Cricket. Every area of the game, including women's cricket, was taken under their umbrella, just as the ECB have done.

The difference is that New Zealand Cricket, according to Graham, is run by a management board of eight. The chairman of NZC, Sir John Anderson, is no cricketer but like Lord MacLaurin, he supplies leadership and expertise in other fields. The one paid member of NZC is Chris Doig, the chief executive, a man who enjoys wielding power and is free to do so.

Doig, too, is no cricketer in first-class or Test match terms, but he did play for Auckland Grammar's first XI, which is probably the next best thing that the country can offer. Graham, who was the school's headmaster at the time (after being a distinguished All Black), says that Doig's CV also includes "common sense, which does go a long way".

Subsequently, New Zealand's cricket has become the small but streamlined and efficient beast which we know today and which has so embarrassed England, with its infinitely greater resources, this summer - not only in the Test series, irrespective of the result, but by reaching the World Cup semi-finals.

The parallels between a large organisation like English cricket and between a small entity like New Zealand's should not be taken too far. But whatever the size of a country's cricket, the ruling management board should not be too big: and the ECB's management board, comprising 15 members, is too unwieldy, even before the powers of veto exercised by the First-Class Forum come into play.

David Graveney, increasingly exposed as England's chairman of selectors after Graham Gooch and Mike Gatting have paid the price for failure, can take heart from the fact that New Zealand's chairman of selectors, Ross Dykes, never played Test cricket either (he was a wicketkeeper for Auckland). So that is no prerequisite for success, even the modest success which New Zealand have achieved.

What is essential is the realisation that the transformation of a country's cricket begins off the field with a board's constitution and administrative structure. Great cricketers, as West Indies proved in the eras of Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards, can paper over the cracks for a while but, once they go, the failings of a system are exposed.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)