The Pink Report

A Minor Disaster

I'm beginning to wonder if there's something in the water at Colin Maiden Park. A malevolent taniwha lurking in the pipes below the visitor's changing room, who stirs and gets antsy when he catches the whiff of maroon and gold gear bags.

Yesterday's drubbing by the Aces was a ghastly exercise in humiliation, with a little bit of bad luck thrown in for good measure. It's the second time this season that the Yahoo!NZ Northern Knights have performed beneath themselves at the otherwise agreeable ground, albeit with quite a different-looking line-up. But many of the worries were the same. When you're a coach and your team's trying, albeit with the sinking feeling, to defend a paltry total of 99 on a pitch with no demons (and possibly even no taniwhas), and you see 11 extras go up on the scoreboard, and most of them are wides, you probably wonder if coaching is some specialised form of torture.

The bad luck arrived in the form of Mitchell McClenaghan. It was his first game for the Aces. The ND guys had previously run into him when he was trying to make headway for Central Districts, when he was useful at times but not usually one of their major threats. My spies tell me that when he was fronting up for Auckland A recently against the Northern Districts A side at Weymouth, he was just going through the motions. Brook Hatwell rustled up a century off him and his mates.

But yesterday morning it was as if someone had waved a wand over him. It seems his first chance to perform and impress for the top-of-the-table Aces (who'd omitted Andre Adams) focused his energies and attention. The same good-looking deck that hosted the HRV Cup final four days earlier was never likely to offer much for the bowlers, so you can't blame the Knights for wanting to bat first on it. It was soon apparent, though, that the meteorological alchemy was right for swing, with the sun managing to blast its way between thick overhead clouds to make for quite humid, hot  - swinging - conditions.

McClenaghan, a former New Zealand Emerging Players side player, was getting it to move around and bowled well. Perhaps the guys were taken by surprise, and perhaps not all of the lbws were plumb (I'll leave that for others who were in a better position to judge), but the net result was that he sliced the top off the order as easily as slicing the top off a soft-boiled egg. When Brook, the third of his lbw victims inside his initial two overs, went for a golden duck, McClenaghan was on a hat-trick. He was denied, but you couldn't deny the here-we-go-again feeling that was already infusing the ground.

There was an eerily similar game two years ago at the same venue that six of the current side will remember all to well - the 2010 one-day semi-final. The Aces won that one by eight wickets too, after ND batted first for just 104 all out. Some noggin named Styris was playing for the Aces that day and picked up three, while Michael Bates blasted through with an incredible 3-8 off six.

Daryl Mitchell's innings was the Knights' last hope yesterday and, for an hour and 10 minutes, which was rather a lot in the context of the match, he jabbed and guided runs with a style that kinda reminds me of Mathew Sinclair, for reasons I can't yet quite fathom. With Graeme Aldridge he put on a partnership of 43, the two batting styles as different as different can be. There was promise, and plenty of time left to bat, but it ended when Daryl had a mare and ran himself out looking for a single that wasn't on. And who should be the one to run him out but McClenaghan, who rocketed the ball to the keeper. This on top of five wickets, having already accounted for Brad Wilson, both Marshalls, Brook and Pete McGlashan. He walked off with 5-30 from just seven overs.

Anyway, back to Daryl's run-out - from there it was all over rather quickly, with G slipping over in his dismissal (I said there was some bad luck, right?) and a rather poor-tasting lunch as the one-day side stomached the fact they'd just been bowled out with, lordy, 19 overs to spare.

No matter how well they bowled, 99 against the cocky Aces just wasn't going to cut it. G's two wickets were the only thing that stopped the home team having it all their own way, but they hardly felt threatened by the team that has dug itself a wee hole at the opposite end of the points table.

This may be a timely point to remind ourselves that the side that's top of the Plunket Shield this season is the Yahoo!NZ Northern Knights. It's a side that dominated the one-day competition a couple of years ago, but the batting hero of that year, Kane Williamson, is now on permanent loan to the Blackcaps, and now he's been joined by that other reliable anchorman BJ Watling. Dangerously good Daniel Flynn, meanwhile, is still not quite match-fit as he trucks back from surgery.

That said, the Knights have loads of talent, some experienced leaders with bat and ball and gloves, and had all their Blackcaps back for the HRV Cup yet ran hot and cold to ultimately perform below expectations in that one, too. It's got to be a taniwha. Hopefully he's not crawling about in the pipes below Seddon this weekend.

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Also down on their luck have been the Northern Districts Under 18s, who have had trouble getting off the bottom of the table at their national tournament in Lincoln over this past week. But they weren't helped by a bad act of sportsmanship from their Canterbury opponents, one of whom has taken to mankadding with zeal.

I think most cricketers recognise that while mankadding may be technically within the rules, it's firmly outside the spirit of the game, unless a batsman is repeatedly pushing it trying to get an audacious "head start" between the wickets (and, even in a situation such as that, has been warned about it). Almost every cricketer in the world is adept and judging the right moment to leave his or her crease for the run, based on the normal momentum of the bowler as he/she reaches his/her delivery point.

Using it as a surprise tactic to get rid of a batsman you can't seem to dismiss any other way is both poor cricket and a poor spectacle for everyone else, but it's been creeping into some spheres of the New Zealand game recently. I hope it can be just as quickly stamped out.