Career dogged by colourful incidents
Matt Poore was always a dog person, so he didn’t hesitatewhen a stray ran onto the fieldwhen playing cricket for New Zealand in Bangalore, India.
He ferried it away from the pitch but received a nip for his trouble, which set off alarm bells in the national team on that epic 1955 tour for fear the dog had passed on life-threatening rabies.
With no doctor travelling with the tour party, it meant Poore required an antibiotic injection every day for the next twoweeks, the jabmostly administered by his team-mates. Some, gleefully.
‘‘The whole family were always dog lovers and Dad would go up and pat any old dog, which he did this time and he got bitten,’’ Poore’s son, Richard, recalled.
‘‘While theywere travelling they would meet a doctor at a specific time, it could be 100km from the nearest town out in the middle of the road for his next injection into his stomach.
‘‘He got something like 12 injections over a 12-day period, some of them from team-mates. I think a few might have taken a bit of pleasure in that.’’
Poore, New Zealand test cricketer No 63, died in Auckland on Thursday, 10 days after his 90th birthday.
He had a short but colourful 14-test career alongside two greats Bert Sutcliffe and John Reid, the latter New Zealand’s oldest living test cricketer who turned 92 last week.
And, as Richard Poore quipped: ‘‘Dad had dogs after that so it [bite] obviously didn’t scare him.’’
Christchurch born-andraised, Poore emerged from the St Albans club athagley Oval. He made his test debut against South Africa at Eden Park in March 1953 and, like Sutcliffe, was employed by cigarette company Rothmans who shifted him to Auckland.
Poore made his highest test score of 45 in his first innings, and in a test career spanning three years he scored 355 runs at 15.43. Of the anecdotes his father shared, Richard Poore said one stood out.
‘‘I remember him telling the story of one tour when the team would emerge from the hotel and part of their training was to jog to the cricket ground. Dad was dating the mayor’s daughter or someone like that, so Dad got delivered to the ground in a limousine each day which you could imagine went down well with his team-mates.’’
Poore played in one of New Zealand’smost famous cricket tests, in Johannesburg at Christmas 1953 when the grim news filtered through that teammate Bob Blair’s fiancee had died in the Tangiwai train disaster.
On a dodgy pitch facing South African speedster Neil Adcock, Sutcliffe and Lawriemiller were hit and hospitalised while Poore, batting No 3, was also struck a fearsome blow on the body by an Adcock delivery and bowled for 15. A tearful Blair walked to the crease atno 11 to accompany a bandaged Sutcliffe who’d returned and blazed his way to 80 not out.
The marathon subcontinent tour of 1955 featured three tests in Pakistan and five in India, and illness was a constant foe. With no doctor on hand, the tourists had to fend for themselves and dysentery, diarrhoea, hepatitis and jaundice all hit various players.
Doses of dark humour was required to get through, as Noel Mcgregor recalled in Sutcliffe’s 2010 biography The Last Everyday Hero, by Richard Boock.
‘‘We had some stuff that helped bind us up; we called it ‘the cork’. The thing was, if you used the cork you also had to take some pills to stop the onset of drowsiness.
‘‘Matt Poore once forgot to take the anti-drowsiness pills and, at one point, virtually went to sleep on the field.
‘‘I was fielding on one side of the wicket and when it came to the end of the over I noticed that Matt didn’tmove from his position at all . . . we went over to him and he was just standing there, eyes heavily lidded, and rocking back and forth on his feet. We had to get him off the field and back to the hotel.’’
While some New Zealand players’ health was affected for years after that tour, Richard Poore said his father showed no ill effects on his return home.
Poore and wife Rae were married in 1957, and 63 years later shewas by her husband’s sidewhen he died early on Thursday at their North Shore retirement village.
Richard Poore, their only child, said of his father: ‘‘If I was a cricketer of his status I probably would have been a lot more proud. Dadwas a very humble person, he didn’t talk much about it and it was never a status symbol with him. He just played cricket because he loved the game, and a lot of his stories were just short quips.’’
Thursday was a sombre one as the family gathered. ‘‘Hewas the father that I think every kid would have wished for. He was a decent human being, a good guy,’’ Richard Poore said.
‘‘We just brought out the display casewith the black cap in it that New Zealand Cricket gave him. Wewere looking at that before and it was kinda nice.’’