The Pink Report

Catching Up With Kane

A big moment is coming up for Kane Williamson tonight as he finally steps out in his first-class county debut for Gloucestershire. Finally? What on earth do I mean, you ask?? Our Nossy’s only 20 - that’s making good time to be signed up as an overseas pro by an English county!

Indeed it is. It’s just that, after the excitement of securing his maiden English county contract - something he found out about just a couple of days before he left for the World Cup, Kane ended up missing the whole first month of the 2011 county cricket season, stuck in the Bay of Plenty while he waited for officials at the British High Commission in Wellington to stamp the necessary visa in his passport and send it back to him so he could get himself to Bristol in England’s south-west.

Apparently the Christchurch earthquake had caused them quite an administrative backlog, and there hadn’t been a chance for Kane to get it done earlier as he needed that passport to get about the World Cup. If you’d bumped into Kane in Tauranga in April, you would have detected the frustration. It’s been an incredible, full-on first year for Kane travelling on the international cricket stage and, even though the visa delay delivered a rare pocket of time to relax at home, he couldn’t wait to get going for Gloucestershire.

It gives you an insight into how purely Kane enjoys the business of simply getting out there and playing cricket - and in that regard the Gloucestershire stint is the perfect follow-up to an international summer in which he hasn’t actually played all that much. After Kane’s maiden BLACKCAPS tours away to the subcontinent in the lead-up to 2010/11 season, which brought him his first test and ODI century, he only got to play a handful of games for the Yahoo! Northern Knights - a few Twenty20s, a solitary one-dayer and zero Plunket Shield matches, in between BLACKCAPS duties.

That was like going on a crash diet after the previous season in which he was the run-scoring mainstay of the Knights’ one-day and four-day campaigns. With the back end of the BLACKCAPS’ programme loaded up with one-dayers in the run-up to the World Cup - and then Kane being left out of the frontline line-up in the first month at that World Cup, the 2010/11 season turned into one of many a net session and not all that much game time for the most exciting young prospect in New Zealand cricket.

That’s been a Catch-22 for many talented young international inductees before Kane. Just cast your mind back to how few opportunities the likes of BJ Watling and Daniel Flynn were getting to play once they were siphoned off into the New Zealand environment, in that no man’s land on the fringes of the playing XI. In some ways it’s almost a relief to get back into domestic cricket, where you actually get an opportunity to put all those things you’ve been doing into regular practice - which is exactly why Kane has been so keen to get stuck in with Gloucestershire.

“They have 18 four-dayers so it’s certainly a much more intense season than what we have in New Zealand,” said Kane, shortly before he flew off. “It will be pretty full on, plenty of cricket. It sounds like I’m going to be quite busy, but I’m really looking forward to learning about my game by playing day in, day out. I think it’s a really good opportunity to kinda do all your training, all your learning in actual games.”

Gloucestershire, which finished mid-table in division two of the county championship last season, is a youngish squad looking to do better on the circuit this season - a collective work in progress, which has made test and ODI century-maker Kane already the subject of plenty of interest and scrutiny as a potentially brilliant overseas score for the Gladiators. This is what Gloucestershire cricket blogger Will Finch had to say about their hot recruit: “Despite sounding like the lead character from a US drama about a friendly serial killer, 20-year-old Williamson is (according to the Wisden Guide to International Cricket 2011) ‘probably the most exciting batting talent New Zealand have unearthed since Martin Crowe in the 1980s’.”

We can of course reassure the Gloucestershire constabulary, however I’m still trying to work out if that second bit is high praise for Kane or a backhanded compliment to New Zealand cricket. Maybe it’s both at once.

With a Kiwi coach (John Bracewell, who Kane had met a handful of times previously) and a Knights team-mate (Hamish Marshall) already part of the playing establishment, it shouldn’t take Kane too long to feel comfortable in the new environment. He’s already made his Gloucestershire Gladiators debut in England’s 40-over comp, contributing a valuable 41 in a low-scoring win over the Unicorns at the weekend (the Unicorns are an official ECB team made up of non-contracted county players - rather a nice idea to keep opportunities in front of fringe or development players).

Clearly Braces has his ear to the ground in New Zealand and has had his eye on Kane’s progress for some time. So how did the approach come about? “The relationship between New Zealand Cricket and John Bracewell helped set it up,” says Kane.

“There was a little bit of discussion with a couple of counties, but nothing came about there, while from the start Gloucestershire seemed the best fit for me with where I’m at. It’s a young side, and obviously I know Hamish really well. From their point of view, I think Gloucestershire were looking for a young Kiwi cricketer and my name was in that bracket, then I spoke to Justin Vaughan who had been speaking to Gloucestershire Cricket and I got the opportunity. I’ve always wanted to go over and play county cricket - you grow up hearing about all the good players over there, so it was very exciting to be offered that chance.”

With it will come a real bonus - the chance for the offspinning batsman to work alongside and pick up a few tips from Muttiah Muralidharan, who’s been signed for the Gladiators’ Twenty20 campaign. “That will be a fantastic experience, playing alongside a great player like Murali - hopefully.”

The cautiousness in that statement stems from the fact he hasn’t made a name for himself in the shortest format. Although a first-choice player in other formats for the Knights, he’s had just a handful of starts in the HRV Cup over the past two summers and is clearly regarded by coaches and selectors across the board as more of a classical, polished innings-builder than a cavalier Twenty20-style innovator at this point in his development.

He’ll take any ribbing about the dearth of IPL offers on his doorstep with good humour, but there was at least a glimpse of his limited overs skills and potential in the business end of the World Cup, when he was given more of a chance to contribute - albeit walking in at six. His cameo of 22 off 16 balls in New Zealand’s semi-final with Sri Lanka wasn’t enough, ultimately, to dig the team out of trouble but, for 23 minutes at least, his stylish chips and drives against tough opponents impressed a number of pundits who had questioned the wisdom of his initial inclusion in the World Cup squad.

If only he hadn’t walked across his stumps against Slinger Malinga, so notoriously difficult to read. He’s the first to admit it. “I’d change that shot if I could go back in time! I made a decision to walk across thinking he was going to do one thing with the ball when it turned out to be another. Cricket, eh!”

Kane sums up his first season in the international spotlight as “very much a learning year of ups and downs - so hopefully now I can move that forward into something more consistent.” It left me curious to know whether, in the final analysis, he felt he got a lot out of his first World Cup? Ultimately, was it worth being there in terms of his growth as a cricketer - rather than immersed in playing four-day battles back home?

“It was quite high-pressured and getting to play in some of those very high-pressure games against the best players in the world was a valuable experience,” Kane considers. “Those earlier trips to the subcontinent had definitely helped. Even though we didn’t perform as well as we’d liked on those occasions and been on the receiving end of winning totals, it did give us that understanding of what we needed to do on a lot of the tracks and how to go about the game in those conditions and when dew would come into it etc - which actually goes a long way to winning a cricket game over in the subcontinent. There are so many different challenges over there and we’d made progress as a team. So, for example, when we were in Bangladesh playing South Africa in the quarters, we weren’t trying for 300 or 350. We knew 240 on that track would be a winning total.”

He did go a bit stir-crazy, though. “You couldn’t really get out of the hotel because the security around all the World Cup teams was so tight. We had one game a week early on, so even with all the trainings there was quite a lot of time for us to kill. I don’t have my cricket gear in my hotel room so we had to come up with ways to pass the time.”

He’d jump on the net first thing in the morning to see how the Northern Knights were going back home and was rapt for the top order when they started piling up centuries in the latter half of the Plunket Shield. Bless.

Naturally we’ve got our pink fingers and toes crossed that Kane will continue to impress at Gloucestershire, flying the flag for us Kiwis proudly and, who knows, we may even have him back for a few Knights games next summer despite him being on this inexorable path to cricket rockstardom. Good luck tonight, Nossy.

Kane isn’t the only Northern Knight playing over in England at the moment. Besides Hamish (who hit the ground running with 121 in his first county knock of the season), James Marshall is also in the United Kingdom for the off-season, playing for North London club Totteridge Millhillians as well as the Lashings World XI (an all-star team that also calls upon the likes of Lou Vincent and Chris Harris).

Obviously we’ve also got three Knights in action at the IPL at the moment with both Scott Styris and Tim Southee playing for the Chennai Super Kings (coached by Stephen Fleming) and Daniel Vettori rolling it over for Royal Challengers Bangalore alongside former pink Knight Thilkaratne Dilshan.

Two more Knights are wintering in the Netherlands’ one-day cricket national club competition. Jono Boult played for Quick Haag in The Hague last year and this season he’s moved to Rotterdam club Sparta 1888. Brad Wilson is the player-coach for a different Hague-based club, HBS, but he’ll be coming back to New Zealand early, before the northern hemisphere finishes, because the good news is that Brad is one of a heap of Knights selected for the New Zealand A winter programme, with the team going into camp later in our off-season.

BJ Watling, Daniel Flynn, Trent Boult and Graeme Aldridge have all deservedly won selection to this year’s New Zealand A programme, too - starting in July, that means they’re in for a Twenty20 tournament in Malaysia, a training camp in Queensland’s Maroochydore and then an emerging players tournament in Brisbane in August.

With the national selectors keen for Daniel Flynn to get completely on top of the groin niggle that he’s been carrying for the past 10 months, Flynny has also been ordered in for a scan and subsequently put into a two-month rehab programme, meaning he won’t be able to play for the Dunfermline Knights in Scotland as he had planned. While Flynny was disappointed to have to let the Scottish team down, it’s great news to have so many Knights one step closer to BLACKCAPS contention. Congratulations fellas.

Meantime the guys aren’t the only ones getting something of a break over the off-season. This is the last Pink Report until the cricket preseason starts up again in spring, but you can keep yourself up to date with Kane’s progress and other key Yahoo! Northern Knights news over the off-season by following our Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/MargotWritesCricket.

Have a great winter everybody. Especially you boys in the All Blacks.