The Pink Report

Take That, Stags!

The morning after the win, the Achilles tendons were as rigid as railway tracks, the back creaked out of bed like some storm-splintered sea mast and a double shot of caffeine was required intravenously. And I wasn’t even playing.

This summer the only men’s domestic one-day match that we’ll see on telly is the final, so with the Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights playing away in Palmerston North on Wednesday, I got to spend a perfect summer’s day holed up inside with a laptop, following the overs and making my wee notes from afar thanks to the miracle of live scoring and the internet. The body’s still complaining. But it was worth it.

The Knights’ batting order needed a good hard win to get their confidence back on track and chasing down 281 against a team like the Stags was just the ticket. Best of all, it started from the top. Daniel Flynn has shown signs all season of being back to his unbridled best, a ferocious stroke-maker when he gets going. The problem has been that second bit - getting going. By the end of the HRV Cup, he was well frustrated by the number of times he’d got promising, aggressive starts in a game before holing out.

Yesterday some luck fell his way when he was dropped on 28 and again as he drew closer to his third one-day domestic century. It reaffirmed that it was finally his day, batting just over 40 overs and slaying a boundary to reach the magic mark, which came off 112 deliveries and brought up the ND 200 to boot.

The Knights needed 85 runs off the last 10 overs (I’ll mention that that’s a required run rate of 8.50, just in case there is anyone else out there as bad with numbers as me). Daniel and BJ Watling’s solid opening partnership had been vital, as was the constant collection of singles through the meat of the innings, to nudging the Knights in front. But even with six wickets still in hand, the writing was on the wall that it was going to be tight. Nethula, Noema-Barnett and Worker had kept a fair lid on things with the ball - boundaries had not been easy to come by, and now Oram was back on. Crunch time.

Oram struck in the second over of his spell, Daniel caught in the covers. Before the over was done, batting partner Pete McGlashan was gone too. Two new batsmen at the crease and suddenly the required run rate was pushing 10.

A month or so in this column we were musing about whether there was a contagious element in batting collapses: if you’ve seen a string of batsmen fail, it can’t help but make you nervous when it’s your turn. Maybe the converse is true, too. Perhaps this match was the proof of it. James Marshall and Graeme Aldridge kept pushing and poking through the next couple of overs, surviving two more dropped chances, until “G” let rip with two boundaries off consecutive Oram deliveries. When he fell to Doug Bracewell first ball of the next over, Bradley Scott rocked up and hit another boundary, first ball. Then another, until the team needed 13 off the last over to win.

With Trent Boult dismissed first ball of that final over, the Knights were nine wickets down and the pendulum swung back to the Stags. Youngster Jason Donnelly, in just his second one-day innings for the Knights, managed a single first ball. Good work, that put Bradley Scott on strike, 12 runs needed off four balls. Bradley sent a bad ball from Bracewell flying for six, and with it hauled the pendulum back. Then they ran a desperate two, almost a run out. Still four runs needed, two balls left, no wickets, hearts in throats.

I wish I’d been there to see that white ball soar over the boundary a second time for the most exciting of victories - but I would have settled for watching it live on the box. Even a highlights package to watch after tea, for that matter. This was hands down the most gripping match yet of the domestic season: two top sides wrestling with the kind of sustained tension you just don’t get in Twenty20 shootouts.

But even though the big 2011 Cricket World Cup countdown is on - and it would be kind of nice to be able to visually assess all 30 players who have made the first cut for the BLACKCAPS squad, soon to be trimmed by half, Sky’s decided there’s nothing to gain from screening domestic one-day matches anymore. Apparently we're not interested in one-dayers much anymore, even though we used to go to watch them in droves of 10,000. We’ve all got Gen-Y attention spans now and can only hack watching Twenty20s.

Write Sky Sport a letter if you disagree. Meanwhile, there are still some tragics who will absorb the whole six hours via an internet scoreboard. Off for a walk now - before I turn into a translucent gelatinous blob and my Achilles' tendons forget their job entirely.