New Zealand sharpen up their spikes (23 August 1999)

23 August 1999

New Zealand sharpen up their spikes

The Electronic Telegraph

When Nasser Hussain announced before this Test that he had total faith in his batsmen, it marked him out as a) new to the job and b) the sort of chap whose beliefs might also extend to the tooth fairy and Father Christmas. And yesterday, he became the first England captain to stand on a balcony and announce that he was "very proud" of the lads at the same time as the crowd below were launching into a rousing chorus of "We've got the worst team in the world".

No one expected Hussain to say what he really thought of his players, at least not in public, but "very proud"? As defences go, it was like Ronald Biggs' barrister informing the jury that his client had merely boarded the mail train to rummage around for a letter that had got lost in the post.

On the not unreasonable assumption that the England and Wales Cricket Board are slightly less proud of the lads than Hussain, English cricket will now enter its annual cycle of soulsearching, and decide that the way forward is to appoint a working party. This often leads to epoch-making decisions, such as appointing another working party to examine the recommendations of the original one.

Bringing in new players is an obvious path to head down, but then again, the list of players invited to represent England in recent years adds up to only a marginally slimmer volume than the London telephone directory. And in any event, all the evidence points to the fact that when the selectors trawl their net through county cricket, it is the equivalent of attempting to locate a Michelin chef in a transport cafe.

New Zealand were understandably delighted at winning the series, and may even knock the All Blacks off their back pages for 24 hours, but elsewhere in the cricketing world, series victories against England now command roughly the same type size as the greyhound results. The days have long gone when beating England represented the taking of a scalp. Nowadays, it's the equivalent of stealing a blind man's wig.

One of the surprises of the summer has been the way New Zealand have added a spikiness to their cricket, largely, one suspects, thanks to the influence of an Australian coach. Not so long ago, the Kiwis were so anonymous that Scotland Yard's search for Lord Lucan was largely concentrated around the New Zealand middle order, but the aggression they've been showing all through the series surfaced yet again yesterday when Dion Nash and Ronnie Irani became embroiled in such a frank exchange of views that the umpires felt obliged to ask the New Zealand captain to calm his bowler down.

One other aspect of this series has been, from both sides, the singularly inept batting. This is something of a universal trend, in that Test matches uninterrupted by the weather rarely end in a draw any more, and the days when you could confidently expect a side winning the toss to have trouble deciding whether to declare on the second evening or the third morning have long gone.

In the first summer of the 1990s, a three-Test series between England and India produced a total of 4,640 runs for 81 wickets, which works out at around 58 runs per wicket. By contrast, in the final summer of the 1990s, four Tests yielded 3,092 for 125, which works out to about 25 runs per wicket. A bowler used to be able to leave the field at the end of an innings and soak his aching bones in a Radox bath. Nowadays, he's barely had time to turn on the tap before someone's telling him to start strapping on the pads.

Only once in this series has a batsman put you in mind of Colin Cowdrey, and that was on Saturday when Adam Parore pulled off a brilliant replica of one of Cowdrey's trademarks - the elegant shouldered-arms leave. The one difference was that Cowdrey chose to leave deliveries outside his off stump, rather than those heading for the middle one.

England's highest individual total of the summer came from a bowler who went in as a nightwatchman and who is currently broken down. Andrew Caddick has been the one bonus, although the final irony yesterday was that the man named as England's player of the series is a New Zealander. It almost goes without saying that New Zealand's least productive player of the series, Roger Twose, is an Englishman.

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