The Pink Report

Corey’s 21st Bash

After an incredible week for New Zealand test cricket and a flourish in the Ford Trophy, there are a few things worth wrapping up before we turn pink at the HRV Cup tomorrow.

Wednesday’s away match at the Basin Reserve was the last Ford Trophy match for a month and a half: the competition resumes on January 26. By then, whatever momentum teams have gained will have been washed away by their Twenty20 form and fortunes, the make-up of the sides may be a wee bit different and it will feel like a fresh start.

While I personally dislike this kind of jiggery-pokery with competition schedules (hey, it’s bad enough that the Plunket Shield is carved in two - and don’t start me on the lack of a first-class build-up to the National Bank test series), that could be good for the Yahoo!NZ Northern Knights.

Wednesday’s domination of the Firebirds in their own nest was exactly what the team needed after poor performances and a bit of rain had seen them plummet to the bottom of the Ford Trophy points table. The batting was back, with both the Marshall twins standing up and James’s unbeaten century ensuring a challenging total would go up on the board.

Regardless of the pitch conditions, Grant Elliot had a good case for making the Knights bat first. He will have understood the mental pressure on the guys to perform after the blowout against the Stags at their own HQ of Hamilton in the previous round. He would have been banking on the batsmen’s confidence still being a bit rattled, mixed in with the now-or-never pressure to get back in the hunt for a top four spot on the table.

To say it didn’t go to plan for him is a bit of an understatement. The Basin has some useful short boundaries if you’re good at playing square of the wicket, a Marshall speciality. James’s 110* off 125 was, I think, his best one-day result for the Knights since his record-setting 152*.

Then in the midst of it Scotty Styris comes in all fired-up to help him along and put a score on the board and belts 50 off 40 with three sixes. But what really crushed Wellington’s spirits and put the game beyond reach was Corey Anderson’s ballistic 74 not out at the close of the innings.

I hadn’t seen Corey bat much until the previous game in Hamilton, where I had thought to myself that it might finally be his day. His place in the starting line-up was probably hanging by a thread at this stage, for even though he’d looked good at the crease, the runs weren’t mounting up. Now, after a messy collapse that had the Knights at 77/4, the acid was on Corey to go out and fix it.

The former New Zealand under-19s player has a full-blooded style that reminds me a bit of a young Nathan Astle: a sturdy plant-the-feet-and-bash-it stance, which is very exciting when it comes off. Whether it matches the interior working of a batsman’s mind, no one can tell from the outside, but he certainly looked confident and it seemed to be going well this day - until he got fooled by one from Nethula and was bowled for 34 off 37.

In Wellington, the bowlers had no such luck. With the platform already built by the rest of the team, Corey’s job was to take it to the next level and, the day after his 21st birthday, he started celebrating with an unforgettable display of six-hitting. I was broadcasting the match on Twitter and my tapping fingers could hardly keep up: there goes a six. Oh, and another one! Four. Another six! Not the most insightful commentary, but it was tornado-force batting.

Corey’s 50 came off just 22 balls, which is the second-fastest one-day 50 in Northern Districts’ history. Statistician Bill Andersson tells me the only faster one was Pete McGlashan’s 19-ball 50 against the Auckland Aces at Seddon Park in 2007/08, which is also the national record jointly held with Canterbury’s Shanan Stewart. Corey’s innings was apparently the fifth-fastest half century in all domestic one-day New Zealand cricket and the team stopped at the 50 over mark just five runs short off the ND one-day record score of 332/5 from 2005/06, which was when James Marshall got that record unbeaten 152.

So that was pretty cool, and while the Wellybirds might have kidded themselves they were still in the game as the rainclouds approached towards the end of the day, the reality is they didn’t have a snowball’s of matching the Knights’ finish. Cue an undisputed victory via the Duckworth/Lewis system and one vital step up the Ford Trophy points table for the Knights, now in fifth place. Top four is all we need, remember. Happy 21st, Corey.

***

New Zealanders everywhere are still talking about the Blackcaps’ stunning test win in Hobart. As Tim Southee innocently reminded us all on telly straight after the game, there are some in the team who weren’t born the last time New Zealand won a cricket test in Australia, in 1985.

Not only was I born then, I was already grown up and watching, and after that series may have been spotted walking round Varsity with a T-shirt that said “9-52”.

It was only the eighth time New Zealand has beaten Australia in a test; ninth if you count the one in 1987 in which we were robbed at the MCG, when Danny Morrison’s appeal for a plum lbw wasn’t given by a daft umpire. Where was Hawkeye when you needed it? (Although, to be fair, Hawkeye probably would have said it was going down leg when it was clearly hitting middle. What’s the point of removing the fallibility factor of human umpiring if the technology is itself fallible, as seemed the case at key moments on the last day in Hobart?).

Tim had a good game with ball and when you look at what he’s achieved already in such a young career and the bank of experience that he’s building, it’s hugely exciting for the Blackcaps’ future. The only thing that bothered me slightly in this test was that I had the uneasy feeling Tim might be turning into one of those talented players who could have been more of an allrounder, but ended up being a bowler. You sense, when he’s batting, that he’s in a hurry to get his runs, and I wonder if that’s because deep down he’s not backing himself at that level with the bat. In two words, he must.

Bowlers can tell themselves they can make up for batting indiscretions with a wicket, and batsmen with a catch, but those runs on the board in the first place are still the most important thing, as the tense finish to Hobart attested.

Doug Bracewell steaming in to win it was a joy to behold, Chris Martin is a story in himself, but one of the things I will really remember is how fierce Trent Boult looked throughout his maiden test match - something he only found out about moments before it started, when Dan Vettori felt his hammy tweak in the final warm-ups. What a stroke of perverse but good fortune that turned out to be. Well done, Trent - four wickets, 21 really important runs and a hell of a victory from your first cricket test. There’s going to be a lot more to come.