Brendon McCullum has led the way for Black Caps with a remarkable innings that capped a remarkable year even by the standards of a cricketer already regarded as exceptional. (AFP)

 

By Mike Selvey/The Guardian


As with Galle seven years ago, so it was heartening to see Test cricket return to Christchurch last week, almost four years on from the earthquake that killed 185 people and destroyed the heart of that lovely city. And on a proper cricket ground too, the new Hagley Park, rather than the old Lancaster Park rugby ground, or Jade Stadium, or whatever else it came to be called.
It was fitting too that the Black Caps should mark it with a resounding win over Sri Lanka, and that it should be Brendon McCullum who led the way with a remarkable innings that capped a remarkable year even by the standards of a cricketer already regarded as exceptional.
McCullum had arrived at the crease with New Zealand, put in to bat, at 88 for three, and scored the fastest ever hundred by a Kiwi, from 74 balls (albeit eclipsing his own record). Nor did he finish there. When he was caught at long-off for 195, from 134 balls, he was within a few metres of utterly obliterating both the record for the fastest Test double hundred in balls faced (still held at 154 balls, by his fellow countryman Nathan Astle, and scored, with nice symmetry, in that same Jade Stadium in 2002). Also, at 202 minutes, in terms of time, his innings came close to Bradman’s 1930 annihilation of England at Leeds in an as yet unmatched double-century time of 214 minutes.
I watched the highlights of McCullum’s innings, and it would not have seemed markedly different in real time. He has always been in the vanguard of modern limited-overs batting, first pioneering a technique that involved advancing down the pitch on the line of off-stump and outside and simply clipping over the legside.
But he has gone beyond that now and sympathy lay with the bowlers for when someone is able to bat in the manner he did there is no hiding place.
Anything remotely back from a length, no matter the line, he carved away through the offside or occasionally smeared legside.
Pitched up to a length or beyond, he drove and later on simply cudgelled it mercilessly. Slower balls disappeared, spin was treated disdainfully.
Against someone of McCullum’s power, even yorkers offer defence only up to a point, for sometimes he sits deep in the crease and sometimes forward of it, the power in his tattooed forearms and the weight at the bottom of the bat more than enough to get the ball away.
The innings completed a year in Test cricket in which he scored 1,164 runs at an average a shade over 75, the fourth highest aggregate in the world and made from fewer matches than the three above him.
Included in this were four centuries, which hardly seems to do them justice, for in addition to his Hagley Park showpiece, there were a pair of double centuries, 224 against India and 202 against Pakistan, and, to cap it, 302 also against India in that same series, the first time a New Zealander has registered a triple century in a Test.
In Christchurch, he hit 11 sixes, which takes his tally for the year to 33, twice as many as anyone else and the most ever hit in a calendar year.
New Zealand has always produced outstanding individual cricketers from a small pool of talent. Indeed, Sir Richard Hadlee is the most clinical pace bowler I have seen; Martin Crowe the best technician with the bat; Daniel Vettori has been the outstanding left-arm spinner of my time; and Stephen Fleming the best Test match captain.
Even if that is a subjective view from a Kiwiphile such as myself (a decade ago we came within a whisker of emigrating there and even bought a beach house in Tairua, a stunning location on the Coromandel peninsula), it is hard to argue with the quality or status of these players. And while describing Kiwi teams as “punching above their weight” has become a bit of a pejorative cliche – and personally I am long past the “Oh, it’s only us, little old New Zealand” underdog schtick that they have used to lull teams in the past – they have consistently produced teams of a quality disproportionate to the resource of other nations.
In limited-overs competitions, an each-way bet on the Black Caps has rarely been money down the tube.
But with the World Cup approaching, and led by McCullum, the outstanding captain in world cricket at the moment, they seem to be gathering momentum and strength as a team.
When he succeeded Ross Taylor as captain two years ago, it was viewed as something of a coup d’etat by the Otago mafia, such was the uncompromising manner in which it was done. It alienated Taylor, a fine batsman and man, and divided opinion.
Mike Hesson was seen as a lightweight coach unqualified for the demands of international cricket. Instead, the pair have transformed the team, with success this past year in all forms of the game: five of nine Tests won; nine one-day internationals won and one tied of 16 games, unstuck only in two heavy defeats by South Africa; and six of ten Twenty20 internationals won.
Individually, there have been McCullum’s runs, the first New Zealander to top 1,000 Test runs in a calendar year, but Kane Williamson came close to that mark as well while Taylor, happily back on board, is a top-10 ranked batsman; two pacemen, Trent Boult and Tim Southee, with 34 and 33 dismissals respectively, are seventh and eighth in the Test list with no other country having two bowlers in the top 10; and, at the time of writing, BJ Watling tops the list of dismissals by a wicketkeeper.
As a team they are prudent, make the most of resources, plan well, have the confidence to go with that and have caught the imagination of their public. It may just be their time.