The Pink Report

Wright Stuff

Pukekura Park is an absolutely lovely cricket ground when you’re not being humiliated in the middle of it. Thursday evening’s batting collapse against The Nemesis illustrated that even in Twenty20 cricket, sometimes you have to change down and travel at a speed befitting the conditions, which in New Plymouth were uncharacteristically slow and sticky after a wet week.

The difficulty for batsmen is that there’s naff all time for them to tune into and get used to a slower pace. In such a condensed, rapid-fire competition, the team arrives in town barely 24 hours before the match and whether or not they even get a hit-out at practice in the local conditions depends on the fickle weather. Most of the Yahoo!Xtra Northern Knights order looked to me like they still had their gearing set on Seddon Park speed.

A few days earlier, Kane Williamson had got a rare HRV Cup start in Hamilton, his uniform pinker than anyone else’s on the park. That was because it hadn’t even been through the wash yet.

Kane gets a lot of light-hearted ribbing for not being able to crack the Knights’ Twenty20 side and was subsequently left off the bus for New Plymouth. Well, Murphy’s Law - the team could have done with him this time. The Knights (especially Scott Styris, Graeme Aldridge and Tim Southee) were exacting with the ball, Pete McGlashan nailed a very classy catch standing up to the wicket and James Marshall was spot on with his tactics as they tried to defend their small total on a small ground, so whether Kane’s spin would have made any difference is moot. But I think his more measured batting style and adeptness at playing back would have been useful against the Stags’ big spin contingent, who had a field day.

In hindsight it turned out to be one of those uncommon Twenty20 matches where you had to shelve the usual obsession with strike rate and runs per over and play proper cricket. The Stags were well prepared, tactically, for the conditions and took a deserved win to draw level with the Knights on the points table. Meanwhile, the Wizards are on a late charge and the Aces are out to a six-point advantage and one victory away from clinching a home final. How big is the Mount Maunganui clash with them going to be? Monday December 27, with David Warner back and both teams psyched up for make-or-break cricket. I wouldn’t miss that one.

***

John Wright’s appointment as BLACKCAPS coach this week has a lot of people believing he will instill hardness and fight back into the struggling team. I’ll sound like the Christmas Grinch for this, but I suspect simply getting back into home conditions will boost the BLACKCAPS’ performance regardless of coach, so it should be a positive first series for Wrighty as coach.

I was fortunate enough to have a close-up view of how John operated as captain of the New Zealand team back in the 1980s, on a six-week tour of India similar to the one the BLACKCAPS have just endured. Similar in terms of scale, that is, not at all similar in terms of results: in 1988, Wright’s team became only the second batch of New Zealanders to win a test match in India, a feat that had previously been achieved some 19 years earlier. No Kiwi side has done so since, and frankly we haven’t had a test team as solid as that 1988 one, either.

Wright’s elevation means that three of that 1988 team have now gone on to coach the BLACKCAPS - the predecessors being John Bracewell and Mark Greatbatch. It was so long ago that test matches still had rest days, and the touring party got through such an arduous assignment with simply a coach, a physio and a manager whose brief was to look after the travel arrangements and diplomatic niceties; no other entourage. Not even a team doctor when all but one of the squad fell sick with a local bug, costing them any chance of a famous series win in Bangalore.

The coach, the late Bob Cunis, was not unlike Wrighty himself: he’d had a mean streak on the field in his day and still had street-fighter’s veins running through him. He liked a fight and had a straight-up way of talking, particularly when it came to describing the opposition. Off the field he didn’t sweat the small stuff and usually took advantage of his charges being otherwise occupied to have a sleep in the dressing-room during play.

The thing both he and Wrighty had in spades was a great knack for understanding and getting alongside people. They brought together a spectrum of very different personalities to fight as a unit, leading with a straightforward approach and not shirking from telling even some of the strongest of personalities in the potent team to belt up when they occasionally over-heated. It was a good team, not just because of the sheer talent or bulldog tenacity of several of those accomplished individuals.

I’m optimistic that John Wright will be a good asset to New Zealand once again as coach. Many are still wondering why it took so long, and I found Justin Vaughan’s statement that the time was not right until now for Wright to take charge of the BLACKCAPS a little odd. He was good enough for India 10 years ago.

Coincidentally his first match as the New Zealand coach will be at the very same place he ended his New Zealand playing career back in 1993. It was a test match against Australia that New Zealand had won comfortably by five wickets, a nice way to send Wrighty off. It was also one of the first matches in which technology was put at the disposal of the umpires and run-outs could be referred to a third umpire seated in front of a TV screen for the dreaded red light.

John Wright was never exactly cheetah-like between the wickets but he was in typically good humour after the end of his last innings, run out for 33, given by the third umpire. “I was trying to run a red light”, he joked. “I got booked. And it wasn’t for speeding!”