Black Caps turn to spinning a yarn
In an unusual move in a country where seam and swing are normally the weapons of choice, the Black Caps have been putting quite the spin on things.
At Seddon Park last Sunday, they bowled 16 overs of spin out of 34, which, adjusted to account for the shortened match, was their seventh-most ever. Three days later in Christchurch, they bowled 23 overs of spin out of 50, their eighth most.
Wellington on Saturday was an exception – Mitchell Santner bowled his 10, and that was it – but back in Hamilton ahead of tomorrow’s fourth one-day international, which the Black Caps must win to keep the series alive, the expectation is very much that their use of spin will be there or thereabouts once again.
Their squad of 15 for the fixture includes three out-and-out spinners – Ish Sodhi, Jeetan Patel and Santner – as well as captain Kane Williamson and his part-time offies.
Williamson and Santner are locked-in starters, while it’s likely one of Sodhi or Patel will come in for Lockie Ferguson, who was expensive in Wellington on Saturday.
But could they both, giving the Black Caps three genuine spinners in an ODI for what would arguably be the first time ever on New Zealand soil?
The question was put to Santner yesterday, and he seemed pretty keen on it, if only because it would mean they’d found a surface that promised to offer him plenty.
He said it would be ‘‘pretty cool,’’ but deferred to the selectors and their wisdom, with the pitch out of sight for now, and what it looks like tomorrow the crucial factor.
With 719 one-day internationals in the books, New Zealand’s record spin-bowling effort stands at 30 overs out of 50 – full complements from Daniel Vettori, Nathan McCullum and Williamson against Australia at Edgbaston in England in the Champions Trophy in 2013, a match that was abandoned due to rain early in the second innings.
In a completed match, it’s the 28 overs out of 50 that Jeetan Patel, Santner and Williamson bowled against Bangladesh in Nelson on December 31 last year.
All told, there have been 19 matches where New Zealand sides have bowled more than 20 overs of spin, using Cricinfo’s definition of a spin bowler, a figure which doesn’t account for situations like Hamilton last Sunday.
Christchurch last week and Nelson last year are two of the three home matches among that number, but before that, you have to go back to a match against the West Indies in Auckland in March, 1987, the second time it ever happened (the first was when two bowlers bowled their allowed 11 in a 55-over match).
In the team that day were Dipak Patel, John Bracewell and Stephen Boock, who you would look at now and call out-and-out spinners. But back then, Patel had cracked the side as a middle-order batsman, and his offspin was turned to as the eighth option in a doomed second-innings bowling effort.
With that in mind, and parttimer Williamson used in the other two, it will be a first if Jeetan Patel, Santner and Sodhi all feature tomorrow, a bold and unlikely move that would mean dropping one of Tim Southee or Colin de Grandhomme.
Whether it eventuates or not, that it’s even in the frame is testament to how important spin has been over the past fortnight, which is a change from the norm indeed.
After their first outing against the West Indies in March, 1987, the Dipak Patel-Boock-Bracewell trio went on to play three more matches together, all of them later that year in India at the World Cup.
There were more outings in 1988, where offspinner Chris Kuggeleijn was the mainstay, joined by Bracewell and Evan Gray, then Dipak Patel and Andrew Jones. After that came an 18-year break, until a one-dayer in Perth in early 2007 where a desperate Stephen Fleming tossed Ross Taylor the ball, and he joined Vettori and Jeetan Patel.
Taylor also joined Vettori and McCullum once, while Vettori and McCullum teamed up with Williamson two other times on top of the record-setter at Edgbaston.
The most famous Black Caps match to feature a triple-spin attack was the 2011 World Cup quarterfinal, where Vettori returned from injury to join McCullum and Luke Woodcock, and, with some help from Jacob Oram, they turned the screws on the Proteas.
Four years then passed before the trio of McCullum, Sodhi and Williamson bowled in every game on a tour of Zimbabwe in 2015, while Santner and Sodhi were joined by Anton Devcich for one match in India last year, making it three in the past four months when you add those against Bangladesh on New Year’s Eve and in Christchurch last week.
Look back over that lot, and, accounting for Dipak Patel’s status at time, only the KuggeleijnBracewell-Gray, VettoriMcCullum-Woodcock and SantnerSodhi-Devcich combinations can really be considered out-and-out spin trios, and they all appeared overseas, in spin-friendly conditions on the subcontinent.
How does New Zealand compare to the rest of the major cricketing nations, you might ask.
Well, it should come as no surprise that India lead the way, with 416 matches with more than 20 overs of spin, followed by Sri Lanka with 366, Pakistan with 274, then the West Indies with 83, Australia with 30, England with 26 and South Africa with 25.