The Pink Report

It’s Moments Like These

Being of unspeakable age these days, most of my contemporary female mates are going through that phase where they’re bringing up small children. I’ve noticed a distinct disparity, arising from the lottery of life, whereby my friends bringing up little girls have all kept a good grasp of their general mental sanity. Visit them and the girls will be playing nicely, quietly even, absorbed in the magic kingdom of childhood without feeling a regular compulsion to break anything that can be broken, notably windows, and here and there the odd tibia or fibula.

Boys, on the other hand, seem to come preprogrammed to launch themselves off trees/fences/ledges/anything that represents a potential visit to A&E. Girls sit on a couch. Boys hurl themselves off it headfirst into the corner of the coffee table, just to test out the aerodynamics and their own physical boundaries. My heart especially goes out to mums of a small male tribe, the stork never having brought them a pink bundle. Their frazzled wits, quotidian domestic chaos and escalating insurance premiums mark them out as Mums of Boys.

Hats off then to Shirley Hatwell. I think Shirley might deserve some sort of official mum’s medal. Not only did she raise a trio of young men, and single-handedly at that after her husband passed away suddenly when the boys were young, but they all turned out to be representative cricketers for Northern Districts.

Brook Hatwell, the youngest, is making his first-class debut in the current Plunket Shield match against the Stags here in Whangarei. Brook has followed in the footsteps of his older brother Jaden, who played three first-class games and nine one-dayers in the early 2000s for the Knights. Brook’s other older brother, Jared, also played in the Northern Districts under-14s as a young fella.

At 27 Brook has grafted through seasons of representing Hamilton and Northern Districts A, so finally getting the tap on the shoulder to step up to the Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights - a long-held goal - is something that means a ton to him personally. But one of the first things we talked about yesterday, after his first day as an official first-class cricketer, was the debt he owes to his upbringing.

“Mum is absolutely amazing. We didn’t have our father growing up and for her to look after us the way she did, and provide all the cricket gear and support, was very special, looking back on it. As we’ve got older, we’ve realised that it must have been hard, at times, bringing up three little kids and having to hold down two or three jobs to keep us all going.”

Working in the South Island, Shirley wasn’t able to be in Whangarei to see Brook’s debut and his brothers are both currently living in the United Kingdom, though with plans to come home for good soon. But they were in his thoughts, and undoubtedly proudly in theirs - and the way things turned out, it’s probably just as well they were spared.

With a big backlift and straight bat, Brook’s a player who always looks like he has an ocean of time to hit the ball and he looked completely unfazed by the traditional newbie’s welcome given to him by the Stags’ bustling paceman Doug Bracewell, who peppered him with short balls. The Knights were three down when he came in, on a batting pitch that was already playing like a fourth-day surface.

As the senior pro Daniel Flynn had the job of righting the innings after the early wobbles, the team keen to make the most of having won the toss, and was already showing the form that would take him to his sixth first-class century later that afternoon.

Brook, meanwhile, soothed his first-timer’s nerves with a few nice clips behind square, patiently kept ducking the silly bouncers and after half an hour or so had got into double figures when his partner’s sweet striking did him in. Not intentionally of course, but getting freakishly run out at the non-striker’s end must be up there as one of the cruellest ways to be dismissed at any time, let alone on your long-awaited first-class debut. Daniel had just blasted a fantastic straight drive, the sort of shot that usually takes a bowler’s fingers off if he tries to stop it. But Mitchell McClenaghan somehow got just enough touch on the cannoning ball to glance it straight into the non-striker’s sticks, with Brook caught out his ground. The sort of thing, basically, a bowler couldn’t do nine times out of 10 if he tried. Maybe not even 99 times out of a hundred.

Brook can’t actually remember the last time he got out that way, although he reckons it’s probable that it’s happened to him before, somewhere along the line in his distant past. “The most frustrating part is I was feeling really good out there. The pitch is a bit slow so I was just trying to play as straight as possible. First game, you don’t really expect a dismissal like that to happen! That’s cricket though, isn’t it.”

Our newest Knight has been in solid touch this summer and he puts much of it down to being able to relax mentally, not sweating the small stuff as you tend to do as a younger player. On the same ground in December, he had gone on to a century against Northland for Hamilton, and more recently racked up another hundy for the As against Auckland A. “I’m understanding my game a lot more now than I have in the past and that comes with experience,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of bats and been pretty happy in that I’ve been able to keep it simple and do it my way. It’s working for me at the moment.”

So is the first-class cauldron really that different from any level he’s played before? “It’s more mental than anything else, I reckon, but yeah. The bowlers are a lot more challenging, they’re just at you a lot more and you hardly get a bad ball. Trying to come to terms with that is probably the hardest thing.”

And yes, he was nervous - not so much when he strode out to bat (a little earlier in the day than the team would have hoped) but the evening before, as he hung out with the other players at their motel after having had the playing XI confirmed. And again in the morning, as they arrived to the waiting field. “Excitement and anxiety all in one is how I’d describe it”, says Brook, “but mainly excitement.

“The four-day stuff is the pinnacle for me as a cricketer, it’s what I’ve wanted to play for a long time, but actually I was bit more nervous before my one-day debut in Wellington a few weeks ago against the Firebirds - because obviously there’s a bit more urgency in the one-day game and we were chasing 290, so there was a lot of pressure going out there chasing from ball one. That was an awesome experience, to be underway with the Knights and to contribute a little bit for the team. It was a beautiful pitch, so I probably should have kicked on there and got 70 or 80, got us closer than what I did, but I got out to a half-decent catch and that’s cricket. It would have been a nicer memory of course to have won that game, but it was a good little insight and it made me hungrier to make the four-day team.”

And now that he’s here, freakish dismissals notwithstanding he’s “absolutely loving it. Loving every moment of being in the Knights squad. I’ve obviously been a round a bit within Northern Districts, so I’ve known most of the guys for quite a few years and it’s been relatively easy to slip into the side, but there is something very special about representing the Knights. Flynny was a nice calming influence when I was batting, he’s a laidback sort of guy out there which is the way I like to bat, as well. He was playing unbelievably well and it was nice to share that little partnership with him on the first day, but it would have been great to carry on. Now I’m looking forward to the challenge ahead and just want to take every opportunity I can. It’s been a long journey for me to make this team and I want to make a career out of it now if I can.”

The good news is that the statistical probability of getting run out at the non-striker’s by the bowler in that manner twice in the same match is in the realm of three trillion to one, so it’s got to be all up from here. By the way, we’re on Twitter now so if you’re on Twitter (or even if you’re not) check into www.twitter.com/MargotButcher for updates on the team’s progress and to see hot-press photos from this and other Knights games as they unfold.

Unfortunately my latest tip is that it may be a long afternoon for the boys in the field - 342 was about a hundred runs shy of the mark batting first on this pitch, but here’s hoping they down a few Stags today and manage to get a good crack in the second dig.