NZ happy to be David this time
It’s the team of 5 million against the team of 1.3 billion. No pressure. By the time you read this, New Zealand and India should be one day into the final of the inaugural World Test Championship. Or then again, they may not be: if cricket is famously unpredictable, so too is English summer weather.
Look on the bright side. The predicted thunderstorm, if it came, will have added a sense of drama that was sorely needed in a championship that had a wobbly start and has been impacted by Covid-19. A shift from the hallowed ground of Lord’s, in London, to the Ageas Bowl in Southampton compounded a feeling that this was not quite the spectacle it could have been, and as cricket nerd Michael Appleton wrote recently, ‘‘fully half of Southampton’s six test matches to date have been ruined by rain’’.
Yet rain may be in our favour. India’s spin bowlers like to work in hot, dry conditions. Cloudy, damp days would suit us nicely.
There are no soothsayers like cricket soothsayers. They run the numbers, they scan the weather. They compare culture. Much has been said about team culture in this David and Goliath match in which, thankfully, we are David.
India has a flashier team, whereas we are about consistency and humility. And it’s not just oneeyed New Zealanders telling themselves that.
British cricket journalist Tim de Lisle, writing in The Guardian, flatters the Black Caps and all of us by association when he writes that: ‘‘New Zealand keep calm and play old-school test cricket . . . India are more exciting, more individual, more flamboyant and less dependable. If the game was all about talent, they would win hands down. Because it is also about temperament and teamwork, New Zealand have a chance.’’
These are the semi-mythical New Zealand values we love to hear about.
It also offers an appealing contrast to the week’s other sporting-related news, although it was really business news. The yachting venture known as Team New Zealand turned down a $99 million offer from the city and country that nurtured it in the hope of a better America’s Cup hosting offer from Dubai, Cork or another friendly port.
Similar anxieties about national loyalty versus the brutal economics of 21st-century sport informed recent arguments about whether New Zealand Rugby should sell a stake to a global private equity firm.
Is it sentimental and oldfashioned to think that national teams should belong to a place and a community?
Awin for the Black Caps would be, as some commentators say, the finest moment in the history of New Zealand cricket. Making the final comes after an astonishing eight-year journey from rock bottom to arguably the best team in the world.
Of course, sports statistics are like Bible verses: you can make them say anything. Statisticians have also worked overtime to calculate how and why India have to be the first winners of this longawaited competition. There will be sleepless nights to come.