The Caps seem to fit Kane
Williamson may be a quiet man but his cricketing brain is in top order.
Taking the advice of the redoubtable Guy Garvey of Elbow, I’ve thrown those curtains wide, but it’s still no good, I still can’t see summer. And maybe that’s the reason why most of us haven’t noticed that the Black Caps have just won their last 10 games in a row. A summer without sun is somehow just not cricket and Kane Williamson and his boys have somehow just passed us by.
Or maybe it’s the Blacks Caps skipper himself. Williamson is the bloke in the corner of the railway carriage who no one ever notices. He is the man in the shop whom you step in front of because you just didn’t realise he was part of the queue.
And yet under Williamson’s captaincy, New Zealand are becoming a formidable all round international side. When Brendon McCullum retired from the job, his team was sixth in the test rankings, fourth in the one day rankings and fifth in T-20. New Zealand now stand fifth, third and first comparatively, an improvement in every category.
But you don’t hear people talk about Williamson’s captaincy in the way they talked about McCullum’s. I suppose that is the nature of the two men. McCullum led from the front. You couldn’t miss him, waving his hands about, brandishing the bat, hurling himself at the ball in a mad chase to the boundary rope and coming up with some garish field positions.
Williamson doesn’t think like that. The commentators loved McCullum, because when one of his funky field positions ever came off, it was hailed as a work of genius.
Yet which commentators ever said how brilliant it is to have a deep cover or a deep midwicket, positions that McCullum sometimes forsook, when they take catches as they have frequently under Williamson’s more balanced strategies.
Strangely Williamson and his cohort Ross Taylor were told to take a bow the other day, when the skipper persisted with one more over of spin, having taken a pasting, and Aaron Finch holed out in the deep. A foot higher and the blokes in the box, always wise after the event, would have criticised a rash gamble that didn’t come off. Ah well, it’s a results driven business.
And that’s the rub for any captain of cricket. When Joe Root, already anointed as the new England captain after Alastair Cook’s wearily inevitable resignation, stood in as captain of Yorkshire, he was soon knocked down. It was the only time Root captained his county and he let Middlesex chase down a total of over 400. And so the senior pros nicknamed young Joe ‘craptain.’
It can be a brutal, souldestroying job. There are not many like Stephen Fleming or Graeme Smith who can do it for any great length of time. Four years is the standard. That’s how long McCullum and Cook lasted. It was pretty much the length of Michael Atherton’s tenure, and it nearly broke the man.
He wrote, ‘‘I found that the job came to dominate my thoughts. During one match, I went to a friend’s birthday party one evening and the next day he sent me a message to ask why I had ignored the guests who had been sitting next to me. I was taken aback: I had not deliberately been rude, but unconsciously I had been thinking about the next day’s play, who to bowl, what to do, to the exclusion of all else. It takes over your life to the detriment of those around you, whether dinner party guests or family members.
‘‘For most, the damage is cumulative. At the start, the job empowers you, and you get an immediate lift to your own form, as do, often, the team. Eventually, the losses, the periods of poor form, and the constant decisionmaking take their toll. There comes a time when you want the headlines to be about someone else.’’
Michael Vaughan said he just wanted to get back to ‘‘being me.’’
But for Williamson summer’s lease has only just began. Like the rest of us, he can look forward to the arrival of the South Africans with something approaching joy. It will be a hell of a test for the side as well as an opportunity to go further up the rankings.
Glenn Turner gives New Zealand ‘‘a reasonable chance’’ against the tourists, whose first game is a T20 at Eden Park on Friday. He says of Williamson, ‘‘He’s undemonstrative and organised of thought and doesn’t do things I see as outrageously stupid. He is more orthodox than McCullum, but doesn’t respect orthodoxy to the point of being inflexible.’’
Williamson will need to be flexible because the Black Caps are effectively playing two South Africas, the squad for the short formats and the test squad. If you want to see the genius that is AB de Villiers, one of the most gifted sportsmen to have played the game, then you need to go to the T20 or one of the five one-dayers at which he will be captain.
De Villiers said ahead of the tour: ‘‘I just need to settle things in my head. Over the last few years something has come to mind, which is the fact that we haven’t won a World Cup yet. And for me to make it to the 2019 World Cup, I can’t really be serious in every format. So I’ve made myself unavailable for the New Zealand test series.’’
Another one bites the dust. Hashim Amla resigned the test captaincy when it became too much for his placid, generous soul. Now de Villiers can’t hack it any more. Let these be warning signs for Kane Williamson and New Zealand cricket because he is being required to do a lot of jobs at a young age.
But for now Williamson doesn’t seem in need of too much advice. He cutely had Australia’s tail-end batsmen dismissed in the third ODI by bringing in a wide slip to stop them running the ball down to third man. And he effected the crucial run-out in the first ODI when he came in as a short and narrow mid-on.
McCullum said, ‘‘I think Kane is going to be an incredible leader.’’
The South Africa tour will be a perfect test of that leadership.