The Pink Report

Bringing Home The Bacon

Pop polls around the place have been inviting cricket fans to vote on which HRV Cup side signed the best overseas players. Every one I’ve seen has been a no-contest win to Northern Districts, and with South African Herschelle Gibbs jetting in this week the star factor has just shot even higher.

Just don’t let the timing of his arrival in pink overshadow the rebranding of another very important signing for the Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights. Twenty20 wasn’t even invented when Scott Styris was punching out test centuries for New Zealand. Now he’s a specialist in the white-ball formats who’s reinvented himself as a very successful roving Twenty20 gun for hire.

Scott was at the forefront of the Twenty20 revolution in fact, catching on a bit quicker than the majority of us in this part of the world who’d heard of the push in England and South Africa to trial the latest ultra-short format. I must admit I thought it would be a bit of a giggle for a while before going the way of Action Cricket, Cricket Max and other formats tried, trialled and abandoned over the years.

Scott was playing County cricket at the time with Middlesex and could see that it was being taken seriously. “We were getting full houses at Lord’s, we were getting 30,000 people turning up for Middlesex versus Surrey, and were getting the same when we went to the Oval, so I got a quick snapshot of where the game was going. Some of the Counties over there were very serious very early on with their Twenty20 programme. It was a precursor to what we’re seeing now: Twenty20 as the lifeblood of the game.”

The curious thing is that although it’s a much shorter format - just over three hours, if both teams are on song, the energy expenditure in Twenty20 feels greater than for a one-day match, he says. “You would think that just a three-hour version of cricket would be a stroll in the park, but the shorter the game, the more intense the happenings in the middle - and quite often you can be more jaded from the mental than physical energy.

“You know you have to be on the ball every moment of it, because your standing in the game can change very quickly. You’re never really out of it, because one small mistake can prove costly. Everything can happen so fast and quite often games feel like they’ve gone really quickly because you’re so in tune with what you have to do while you’re out there.”

So what’s Scott doing back in Northern Districts, the side for which he made his first-class debut way back in the 1994/95 season? The 35-year-old, late of the Auckland Aces, grew up in Hamilton - he’s a Hamilton Boys’ High first XI old boy. When he was approached by Northern Districts CEO David Cooper to play for his old team earlier this year, the idea of closing out his career back where it all began held a lot of appeal - not to mention the challenge of helping the Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights try to nab the one trophy that eluded the gun-hot team last year.

Scott reckons Twenty20 came along at the right time for him in his career and he enjoyed playing the HRV Cup to full houses so much last season that he basically can’t wait to stride out onto Seddon Park this Friday evening. In England, Middlesex - known as the Pink Panthers - also play in an attention-grabbing pink Twenty20 uniform, but Scott’s tenure there was before they went all cotton floss. So, it’s also going to be his all-time debut in the Knights’ new favourite colour.

Yes, the other great gift offered to all Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights fans by Scott’s exciting return is that the options for pink-themed banners have just gone through the roof. With a nickname like “Pig”, this surely is a marketing marriage made in heaven. Pigs are very intelligent of course, so quite fitting. And George Clooney had a pet porcine, so pigs must be the height of cool. You know that behind these honey-words I’m blatantly rabble-rousing: get out those pink sheets and poster paints people, I’m so looking forward to the artistic interpretations. Th-th-th-that’s all folks!